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ISSUE #3 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1994 TWO DOUARS 


OK, maybe you all are 
scared, or maybe you just don't 
like our zine, or what, I don't 
know, but we haven't gotten 
ANY submissions from 
people like you (the reader). 
Perhaps We're just not making 
ourselves clear: We will ac- 
cept anything (articles, short 
stories, D.I.Y. info, comics, 
interviews, scene reports, 
pictures, anything) of course, 
that does not mean that all 
submissions will be printed 
(but really your chances of 
getting in are VERY good). 
Go for quality. A good story 
will be printed over a bad one, 
a good interview (one that is 
interesting and goes beyond 
the “so what’s your favorite 
tour story”) will get priority 
over a bad one, and so on. 
Now, maybe you think that 
the band you want to interview 
isn't punk. Chances are, it is! 
Interview them (all interviews 
should be accompanied by 
photos), and we'll sort it out. 

We are strictly volun- 
teer run and make no profit 
what so ever off of this publi- 
cation (hell, we're losing 
money). All money made goes 
back into Punk Planet. We 
will review any record or zine 
as long as it is not on a major 
label (even if the band itself is, 
but the record is not) and will 
not be biased as to whether it 
is punk or not, since we have 
about as little a clue what that 
means as you do. W e 
hope you enjoy this issue, and 
if not, we encourage you to 
make your own zine. In fact, 
we encourage you to make 
your own zine any way (isn't it 
cute how we always end this 
part that way). -The eds 


Too Many Addresses 

the general confusion from all these different addresses is STAGGER- 
ING. Please, just read who gets what and send it there. If you are still 
confused, just give the PPInfoline a call, and we'll tell you where to send 

stuff 


Distribution information, Mailorder information, Ads 
being sent in. General Correspondence, and random 
acts of kindness to: 

Punk Planet 

P.O. Box 171 1 Hoboken, NJ 07030-9998 

make any and all checks & money orders to Julia Cole. 


Please send all submissions and LETTERS!! to: 
Punk Planet North 
PO box 1559 Chicago, IL 60690 


Fanzines & Records for review go to, by the way. you can send 
UPS here: 

Punk Planet South 
c/o Will Dandy 

Route 2 Box 438 Leeds, AL 35094 


starting next issue (yeah, sure), we will be dedicating a few 
pages to Punk Events please send all information pertaining to 
your event to: 

Punk Planet West 
c/o Lois Lame 

P O Box 84253, San Diego CA 


For all you electronic whizzes (and really, who isn't) 
letters and submissions can be sent to: 
PunkPlanet@aol.com 


And finally, the direct line to a good time: the 
PPInfoline, find out ad availablity, submission informa- 
tion, and distro goodies. 

(312) 227-6114 


Advertise in Punk Planet! 

full page (8" x 10.5") $100 
1/2 page (7.5" x 5") $50 
1/3 page long (2.5" x 10") $35 
1/3 page square (5" x 5") $35 

1/6 page (2.5" x 5") $20 

all ads are due October 10th! 










A 



Mail 
Columns 
Scene Reports 
Interviews 
Jawbreaker 
Defiance 
Blanks 77 
Propagandhi 
fiction 

The Death of a Disco Dancer 
Pom 


Articles 

47 

Student's Rights 

Cartoons 

50 

Queen of the Scene 

DIY 

52 

Record Reviews 

54 

Zine Reviews 

65 


5 

8 

20 

27 


38 


The Solar System 

Dan Sinker- Planeteer 
recruiter. Grammar king. 
Layout cheerleader, coordi- 
nator, mailing, ad layout, the 
biggest sucker of them all!!! 

Will Dandy- Ad God, 
Distribution whiz, coordina- 
tor, zine & record collector, 
sucker 

Karen Fisher- Layout 
Goddess, sucker 

Julia Cole- on vacation and 
on TV (and aren't we 
jelous! !) 

Bob Cole- Julia's husband, 
not on vacation, back of 
steel. 

Kristen Francis- Ad Layout 
Genius, AWOL? 


Planeteers 


Larry Livermore 


Jim Testa 


Dave Hake 


Darren Cahr 


Jim Connell 


Matt Berland 


Steve Cook 


Jon Entropy 


Dave Larson 

ct) 

David Selevan 

c/T 

Bret Van Horn 


John Zero 

cr 

o 

Eric Action 

c/> 

John Crawford 

<; 

p 

Jason Grossberg 

r-+ 

Lee Greenfeld 

< 

rt> 

c/j 

T. Chandler 

• -o 
•o 







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‘Beware that, in fighting 
monsters, we do not be- 
come monsters our- 
selves.” 

Friedrich Nietzche 
We all like to think 
of ourselves as artistic in 
our own lives. Whether 
we’re having a good time, 
doing what’s necessary to survive, or fighting the 
good fight against whatever evils we perceive 
need to be combated, we all would hope that we 
are being innovative and creative in what we’re 
trying to do. Unfortunately, most of us spend too 
much of our time reacting to things, and not being 
original in our approaches, especially against 
what we don’t like and oppose. 

Being reactive can take on a number of 
forms. The main one is that we become like the 
thing we don’t like. If someone we don’t like is a 
sarcastic jerk, we often feel like we have to be ten 
times as sarcastic in order to deal with his or her 
attitude. Another way that we can be reactive is 
by doing the exact opposite thing that we don’t 
like. So, if someone is very controlling, we become 
very non-controlling. Whether or not these re- 
actions are appropriate is not the point. Neither is 
at all creative, innovative or interesting. In fact, 
both make us real predictable and quite dull. 

That’s my impression in general of the 
first issue of Punk Planet. When I first picked it 
up and glanced through it, I thought, “Oh no, 
MRR Junior.” There’ s hundreds of different ways 
to lay out and produce a ‘zine, so why do a take- 
off on the newsprint, black-and-white, columns- 
scene reports-interviews-reviews format that 
makes MRR so ugly? If its to prove that it can be 
done better and nicer, then Punk Planet is largely 
a waste of time. 

My first impression in reading Punk 
Planet basically confirmed my feeling that the 
‘zine is not much more than a reaction to MRR. 
Many of the columnists talk exclusively about 
their reactions to Tim Yohannan’s new, restric- 
tive music policy. Other than that, there does not 
seem to be any unifying factor holding the ‘zine 
together. I don’t see wanting to make a viable 
alternative to MRR as reason enough for Punk 
Planet's existence. There should be some kind of 
shared ideas or vision or concerns that the ‘zine 
can use as a focus. And finally, the attitude that 
“we don’t know what punk is any more than you 
do” is exactly the opposite of Tim Yohannan’s 
approach, and equally as piss poor. On those 
grounds, someone could submit music that would 
be suitable for Windham Hill, call it punk, and 
Punk Planet would have to review it. The way to 
respond to MRR' s excessively restrictive music 
standards is NOT to have no standards at all, but 
to do some real thinking to come up with rea- 


sonable, intelligent standards. 

Human beings are deforesting the planet 
at an alarming rate. Rain forests are going under 
the ax without regard to the hundreds of species 
that become extinct every day as a consequence. 
At this point, Punk Planet is just a waste of good 
trees. Unless the ‘zine can figure out what it wants 
to be and do, independent of Tim Yohannan and 
MRR, then the name will be its ultimate irony; a 
publication that contributes to an ugly punk planet 
completely stripped of forests and the animals 
that used to live in them. 

Andy Social 

Punk Planet came about because of 
the changes in policy that happened at MRR 
early this year. The first issue of Punk Planet 
( which you are writing about) dealt a lot with 
that period of time, and people’s personal re- 
actions and feelings about it. Yes, Punk Planet 
started as a reaction to MRR. We never hid and 
said that it didn ’t! It would have been even more 
stupid for us to have denied MRR’s existance 
and influence on punk at all, and just lied and 
said what we were doing was an entirely different 
and original idea? I don ’t think so. 

As far as being U MRR Jr”, I almost 
take that as a compliment. You saw ONE ISSUE 
( the first issue at that) and instantly comparied 
it to MRR, a magazine that has been creating 
itself for TWELVE YEARS. That’s an accom- 
plishment if you ask me. If with the first issue, 
we are already at the level of MRR ( according to 
you), then where will Punk Planet be in twelve 
years? 

I have to entirely disagree with you 
when you say that being an alternative to MRR 
is not reason enough to exist. Since when has 
being a vital part of an ongoing discourse (that 
of punk culture) not been reason to exist? I 
would like to think that we are giving a voice to 
concerns in areas and ways that MRR has not 
covered. That goes for both opinions AND music. 

I ask you this: if a punk label spends 
its money creating and promoting a band that 
sounds like something on Windham Hill, why 
WOULDN’T we review it?? Obviously the people 
that put it out and sent it to us thought it was 
punk, so why shouldn’t we??? 

Finally , I find it hard to buy your 
argument that Punk Planet is destroying the 
worlds precious forests, when you criticized us 
for publishing on newsprint, which is 100 % 
recyclable. 

Most importantly though, I hope you 
watch (and help) Punk Planet grow. 

Dan 




Hello, 

I’m writing to in- 
form you that the infor- 
mation regarding the 
band “Not My Son” in 
PP#1 (Seattle scene report) 
is incorrect, though we do ap- 
preciate Dave Larson for mentioning us. 

At this time we are planning on moving 
to Texas (San Antonio) in January and are looking 
for a drummer who is willing to relocate there. If 
anyone is interested please write. 

Also, there aren’t any demos (ran out 
about a year ago) but we do have 7”s for $3.00 

ppd. 

Thank You, 

Carol Steele 
NOT MY SON 

323 Broadway Ave E. Suite 1 105 
Seattle, WA 98102 


I just finished reading 
your zine ‘Punk Planet’ 
and found that it is a 
total criticism of M.R.R. 
yet practically laid out 
like M.R.R. I dont under- 
stand why so many people dont 
understand what Tim Yohannon is trying to do. 
He is simply making M.R.R. a zine that only 
covers Hardcore/punk. What is the problem 
with that? Its his mag he can do what he wants! 
When he refuses to cover certain things that 
arent Hardcore/punk he has every right to. 
Personally i like other forms of music besides 
hardcore/punk, but when i open MRR I only 
want to see hardcore punk, even thought I like 
other music forms; hardcore punk will always 
be #1 for me. There was a time when I could 
page through M.R.R. and find 99% hardcore/ 
punk. However in the past few years many other 
forms of music were in M.R.R. and being 
someone who buys records throught the mail I 
was many times disapponted to read a review of 
a record saying how punk it was only to get it 
and hear music that was anything but hardcore/ 
punk. Believe me it sucked. So instead of tearing 
the hell out of a mag that has done so much good 
over the many years; why don’t you guys just 
work on your zine and put in it exactly what you 
want!? 

As far as bands going to majors I 
don’t care. Most of those bands aren’t what I 
consider punk/hardcore and I wouldnt buy thier 
records wheather they were on a label run out of 
some guys house down the street or if they were 
on a huge corporate label, but I sure would be 
mad if a favorite band of mine was talking 


against Major labels and corporations since their 
start and then decided to sign with a major and 
then the price of their records and shows doubled 
and tripled that would make me very mad. Not to 
mention that they would be going against 
eveything that most of these bands hold dear to 
them (at least when they started out and need 
everyone to like them), and I can’t stand a person 
or group of people who suddenly change thier 
ethics, values and principles for a few $. (or any 
amount of money) So think about all that and I 
wish you luck with your zine. 

Sincerly, 

Mike Beer City 
PO Box 494 

Milwaukee, WI 53122-0494 
PS Skate Tough! F.S.U! 

WARNING TO ALL PUNK PLANET READ- 
ERS: in Punk Planet you may find reviews of, 
interviews with, or refrences to bands that are 
not 99% hardcore punk . Consider yourself 
warned. 



Dear Punk Planet, 
Since zines are sup- 
posed to go to one lo- 
cation and correspon- 
dence another, I’ll just 
hope this letter finds its 
way into the right place and 


the proper hands. 

I really like the zine, and think it is a noble 
effort. However, the repeated refferences to 
MRR are tiresome and sometimes seem a bit 
petty (ie, the “BANNED” remarks on the record 
reviews), and I hope that it is a short lived habit. 
Afterall, Punk Planet isn’ t going to be much of an 
“alternative” if it is constantly referring to it and 
comparing itself to MRR. 

Otherwise I do think Punk Planet does have 
potential to be a new outlet for creative projects, 
which is great. So, thanks, and good luck. 


Sincerely, 

Tyson McCreary 
13393 La Barr Meadows 
Grass Valley, CA 95949 

Tyson (and the multitude of others that have 
complained about the BANNED feature )- 
You will notice that starting this issue we have 
stopped using the BANNED refrence in our 
record reviews. This has something to do with 
the negative response we have received about it, 
but actually has more to do with the fact that we 
have NO WAY of knowing that a record got 
refused by MRR, unless we are told by the label. 
Since no label has actually told us that they have 
been refused by MRR (although that doesn't 


mean that they haven’t been), we have stopped 
including it in record reviews. 

Dan 



Will, 

Hi, Dave Coker 
here. This is my fanzine 
“Personal Politics.” I’d 
rather not have this issue 
reviewed in “Punk Planet” 
because A) We went to a new printer and he 
kinda fucked up and B) I kinda fucked up in a few 
places. 


So why am I sending it? ‘Cuz I wanna 
tell you that “Punk Planet” is the coolest ‘zine 
I’ve seen EVER!! It’s MRR without all the shit 
being talked and negative attitudes. Sometimes 
(a lot lately) I’ve felt like MRR has been bringing 
down the scene overall. “Punk Planet” is dedicated 
to furthering punk and its positive aspects. I 
really respect that. I also caught a copy of yer 1 
pg. ‘zine, “Quality Control” and I liked it as well. 
Remember, please don’t review this issue #5 will 
blow this one outta the water. Thanks for giving 
a shit. 


Dave 

Personal Politics 

POB 644 

Banner Elk, NC 28604 

Actually, I liked Personal Politics a lot despite 
what you said. I can relate a lot to being a loser. 
Anyways. Thanks for your encouragement; it 
helps keep us going and please send future 
issues of your zine to us to review. What really 
scares me is how you got a copy of my one-pager. 
I only had it sold at one record store and sent it 
to two people. That's really weird, but glad you 
liked it too. 

Keep in touch, 

Will Dandy 



hey, kids, in your is- 
sue #2 of PP, you for- 
got one thing in the 
cool beans 

interview: how to get 
on to the BBS!!! 
i have never used a BBS and 
you all never mentioned how to use cool 
beans bbs 

or what the email address for matt kelly is. if 
you know this info 
then let me know... 


oh yeah i liked your zine overall, good job 
love cameron 

madchild@u. washington.edu 

First, I am wondering why a guy who sends his 
letter over the internet is having trouble signing 
onto a BBS. But for those who don 't know how 
to figure it out, here's how: 

1. Get a modem and hook it up to your computer 
and your telephone. I don 't know how to do this 
part, unfortunately. Find someone to do it for 
you (that's what I did). 

2. Make the modem dial the Cool Beans! phone 
number (1-415-648-7865). I don't know how to 
tell you to do this part, either. It will depend on 
what kind of software came with your modem 
and what kind of computer you have. I pull 
down the menu entitled “Phone” and then 
“Dial... "It's probably something equally simple. 

3. The phene will dial, you will hear ringing and 
then a strange and lovely screeching sound (my 
favorite part). When you are connected, the first 
message that appears will ask you whehter you 
want graphics/color. If you have a Mac or don ' t 
know whether your computer supports this, pick 
“N” for no, or you will get totally fucked up. 

4. Type in “NEW” when it asks you to enter your 
name. 

5. Now you will go to the New User Menu. 
Choose “R” to register as a new user; then push 
the ENTER (or RETURN) key when it tells you 
to do so. 

6. You 'll be treated to a little introduction , then 
just follow the prompts; they will tell you what 
info to type in (your address, etc.) and when. 
Push the ENTER (RETURN) key after you type 
out each line. Remember to choose the name 
you willbe using on-line, so if you want your on- 
line persona to have a cool name, do it here! 
Pick something you can live with, and that you 
don ' t mind being identified with. 

7. After you get signed on you will be subjected 
to menus (lists) which will take you to different 
areas on the board. You can send mail, read 
messages, post messages or whatever. Choose 
“M” if you want to read mail, for example. It's 
not as easy as being on a graphical interface 
BBS like CompuServe orAOL, you kind of have 
to feel your way thru and figure it out as you go 
along. It's more rewarding when you do, believe 
me. In fact, I don't know why I'm being so 
patient with you...go do it yourself! 

Karen Fisher 

Hey Kids, KEEP THAT MAIL 
COMING IN!!! 
send all correspondence to: 
Punk Planet North 
PO Box 1559 
Chicago, IL 60690 



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1994: THE YEAR PUNK WENT BROKE 


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Karen 


I like the fall. One reason is that 
summer is finally over. Summer is too bright 
and sunny, with too many people every- 
where (at least here in San Diego). I guess 
the cool breezes of autumn also bring up all 
the emotions associated with back to school , 
mainly my elementary school days. I was a 
nerd and a goof-pff, but in grade school 
everyone loved me, teachers and fellow 
students alike. Every fall my mom would 
take me to Sears and we’d pick out new 
clothes, complete with matching barrettes 
and hair ribbons. Then we’d go get some 
new pencils and goofy animal-shaped eras- 
ers, a brand-new shiny lunchbox and other 
necessary back to school supplies. To this 
day I love the smell of the stationery store 
and I wish they still made those metal 
lunchboxes. 

But as the years went on, school 
was not so fun for me anymore. My family 
moved and suddenly I was not popular. In 
fact, I was incredibly unpopular; I actually 
started getting laughed and pointed at. Jun- 
ior high was probably the worst time ever to 
start a new school. All the kids had long 
straight hair; girls wore shorts, tube tops 
and thongs to school. I was used to wearing 
little jumpers and oxford shoes with thick 
socks, I looked like a little baby next to 
those surfer babes. I guess my glasses and 
braces didn’t help matters. I was totally out 
of it. I was teased and derided almost every 
single day. I spent all my time hiding from 
people and had a constant sick feeling in the 
pit of my stomach. 

As the years went on and I got into 
high school, things got a little better. My 
sense of humor made me a few good friends 
and got me some laughs in class. Some of 
my friends tried out for cheerleader and 
instantly became ultra-popular. I tried out 
the same year and failed miserably. After 
another year of anonymity, I tried out again 
and made it my senior year. Luckily for me, 


at my school, the entire student body 
didn’t vote for the cheerleaders, only 
teachers and a few graduating seniors. 
Yes, I was a high school cheerleader. 
Although it didn’t mean as much as it 
might have in other schools, I might as 
well not try to hide it. Nevertheless, I 
never did enter the elite inner circle. I 
don’t know why I tried so hard to do so. 
It was pretty pathetic. People talked to 
me and said hi, but I’d hear about their 
parties and weekend episodes and won- 
der why I never was included. There was 
just the constant feeling of people look- 
ing down on you, judging you if you 
wore something, said something, or did 
something they had privately deemed 
unacceptable. Trouble was, you never 
were quite sure what would make that 
cut. 1 had two or three close friends and 
that was it. They were really good friends 
(and still are) but unfortunately for me 
they were very pretty and I always com- 
pared myself to them, falling short of 
their social status (especially with boys). 
I never had a date in high school. My 
girlfriends would try to fix me up with 
friends of their boyfriends, but the re- 
sponse was always the same: “Aah, well, 
Karen’s just too smart/funny for him.” 
Translation: she’s too weird. This hap- 
pened so often it became an inside joke 
with my friend Tracy and me. I went to 
twodances in my life; the first junior high 
dance and the first high school dance. 
During both I spent the whole time trying 
to look casual and pretend I didn’t care no 
one was talking to me (let alone asking 
me to dance with them). That was only 
the social side of it. As for the academic 
part? Well, if you expressed any intelli- 
gence in class (especially if you were to 
express an original thought rather than to 
just regurgitate a fact found in the text- 
book) you were laughed at - just more 
proof that, you were a nerdy goon and not 
one of “them.” And what of the teachers 
who were in on the conspiracy - fawning 
over the pretty and popular kids, neglect- 
ing and demeaning the potheads or other 
social misfits? 

In high school I got into some 
relatively minor scrapes with “the law,” 
meaning the vice-principal’s office. My 


smart mouth got me into trouble with a 
couple of teachers who thought I would be 
best dealt with there. So for talking in class 
or otherwise expressing myself as an indi- 
vidual (very minor offenses, believe me), I 
was repeatedly raked over the coals; told of 
the many variations on which I was an 
unacceptable and totally worthless person; 
had the complete litany of derogatory re- 
marks then repeated to my parents; and was 
punished for weeks of detention or “trash 
pick-up.” I hate to think how people who 
really did something “wrong” got it. I know 
everyone must say this, but we must have 
had the meanest and ugliest girls’ vice- 
principal ever. She was truly evil. 

All of these experiences led to my 
constantly doubting my own worth as a 
person. Throughout it all, I wondered about 
all the well-meaning adults who were con- 
stantly ordering me to enjoy my school 
years, that “these are the best of your life!” 
I couldn’t imagine that this was the best it 
ever got. I still have a tendency to fall into 
bouts of depression, but during my teenage 
years it got pretty black at times. If I ever 
thought of suicide, the thought that it never 
got any better was almost enough to push 
me over the edge. To tell you the truth, if I 
wasn’t so scared of the pain or of failing to 
finish myself off completely, I probably 
would have done it. 

I’m not whining when I look back 
at all this. I know many, many kids had / 
have it much, much worse. Although I 
constantly fought with my parents (esp. my 
mom), and was constantly on restriction 
(from all the social activities I was never 
invited to), I knew my parents loved me for 
who I was, and never abused me. I also had 
one or two teachers who praised academic 
excellence and challenged me not to be 
embarrassed of my intelligence (my AP 
English teacher actually used to make fun 
of me in my cheerleading uniform -I secretly 
loved her for recognizing the geeky and 
smart side of me, which I was trying so 
desperately to hide). Despite the pain and 
heartbreak of those years, they are actually 
quite amusing for me to look back on now. 
I went to my ten-year reunion and my eyes 
were really opened. Some of the people that 
I thought had it all together at the time are 
pretty pathetic now. Their golden youth 
gone, they ’ ve got nothing left to strut about. 




A 



Their main satisfaction in life is to look 
back and remember how great they once 
were. Great in comparison to a bunch of 
other small-minded teenagers? How sad. 
Yes, some others in my class became 
“successful,” but they also appeared to 
be cokeheads or otherwise unconnected 
to unreality, still concerned with petty 
things like money, clothes and cars. What 
was surprising to me was that most of the 
nerdy or generally socially-unaccepted 
kids had blossomed into the most inter- 
esting and creative adults, with really 
cool jobs and/or lives. I felt like the kids 
who had constantly looked down on me 
were now wistfully looking up to me. 1 
felt powerful over them at long last. I 
was really enjoying my life and was my 
own person, comfortable with who I was 
and proud to be different, while they 
appeared to be nothing more than empty 
shells of people. Their teenage superstar 
personas no longer fit. Somehow the 
tables had turned. If you want to learn a 
lesson from my life, don’t spend so much 
time worrying about what everybody 
else thinks and just do or say or wear 
whatever you feel. Be brave, be proud to 
be smart and different . You’ll win out in 
the end. 

I remember reading a story in 
the Sonic Youth fanzine about how 
classmates used to call Thurston Moore 
“Devo” and beat him up because they 
thought he was a geek for acting differ- 
ently than the rest. Lou Barlow and oth- 
ers that took part in the same discussion 
had had similar experiences. In fact. I’ve 
noticed that almost every interview I’ve 
read of anyone I respect as an original 
artist, or any person I’ve met whom I 
admire for their individuality, relays a 
similar background of being one of the 
“losers” in school. At the time, it seems 
like the pit of hell. But these experiences 
seem to make us stronger in our future 
lives. Those who had it easy in school, 
breezing through on their looks and 
popularity, are in for a shock when, they 
get to the real world where brains and 
original thoughts are worth something 
(well, most of the time). 

Now it seems like the alterna- 
tive look has become the cool way to 


dress and act. I don’t know how kids try to 
express individuality against that. I think it 
kind of defeats the purpose to get a tattoo, 
dye yourhairorpierce your nosejust because 
it’s the cool thing to do and everyone else is 
doing it. Hell, there are national magazines 
teaching teenagers how to dye their buzzcuts 
blue. All I can say is, for anyone who’s still 
stuck in that horrible nightmare of phoni- 
ness and repression called junior high or 
high school, please hang in there and know 
that these are NOT the best years of your 
lives. The best is yet to come, if you hang 
onto that originality and weirdness for which 
you are now ridiculed, or even punished. 
Those talents just may be your ticket out. 
Tell me how lame I am for playing the 
game and being a high school cheer- 
leader. I swear, I never used pom-poms! 
P.O. Box 84253, San Diego, CA 92138, or 
e-mail me at loislame@aol.com 





When I think of school, I think of 
the $91,000 in debt that I currently owe to 
banks and the government. I spent nine 
years of primary school, four years of high 
school, four years of college, and three 
years of grad school (that’s twenty years for 
those of you keeping score at home) edu- 
cating myself so that I could enter the world 
burdened with a kind of colon numbing 
deficit that even our own government would 
never accept. 

I am an idiot. 

But that isn’t the real subject of 
this column (though I’m sure I could put 
together a “Top Ten Reasons Why I’m An 
Idiot” list with little or no help from my 
friends. For example, Number 7: I still 
enjoy seeing the Rollins Band. But I di- 
gress). The real subject of this column is the 
fact that this nation is the only major indus- 
trial power that doesn’t think educating its 
populace is something worth paying for. 

Which is hardly the most shocking 
revelation for any of you lucky enough to be 


stuck like a fly in the ointment in some 
prison/high school currently operating 
in any of the major metropolitan disaster 
regions of this nation. How many of you 
go to schools full of teachers too shell- 
shocked (and too underpaid) to give half 
a shit about your educational needs? 
How many of you have virtually no 
access to computers, no access to mod- 
ern textbooks, and no science labs to 
speak of? 

Most kids in this country go to 
schools exactly like that and worse. Far 
worse. Which is why Costa Rica has a 
higher literacy rate than the United States, 
and the reason why something like half 
of the students in the city of Chicago 
drop out before graduation. And you 
want to know why this is? I’ll give you 
one word: 

Greed. 

Suburban property owners 
throughout this nation (and by that I 
mean everywhere except for the state of 
Michigan) have created a system whereby 
the vast majority of funding for schools 
comes from local property taxes. If you 
live in suburb X, most of the money for 
the school district of X comes from X. 
Simple enough. But what this means is 
that if you move to a wealthy suburb, you 
can have $10,000 per student per year 
spent on your education, because they 
don't have to share the money with any 
other district. If you live in, say, a poor 
black suburb on the south side of Chi- 
cago, you get something like $3,000 per 
year per student spent on your education, 
because the rich suburb doesn’t have to 
spread its education dollars around to 
anyone. This means that (in case you 
didn’t already known it) that if you’re 
born with privilege, you have the oppor- 
tunity to receive an education. If you’re 
poor, well, maybe (if you’re lucky) you 
can scrape one together. 

The fact that the quality of your 
education in this country depends almost 
entirely upon how^+nuch money your 
parents have is absolutely disgusting and 
the root cause of a good percentage of the 
problems this country faces. You think if 
the population of this country was edu- 
cated to extent that they should be that 





A 


©Columns 



we’d have such an impoverished 
underclass? You think we’d have a govern- 
ment distantly related to economic reality 
and even more distantly related to anything 
bordering on effectiveness? You think that 
your “free” public education is the same as 
everyone else’ s in this country? Guess again. 

You are getting fucked. 

There is nothing more important 
to the essence of punk than education. This 
is, to many, a silly and (perhaps) naive 
notion. But without a true vision of the 
world, one that encompasses everything 
from Adam Smith and Marx to Minor Threat 
and De Toque ville, you’ve limited yourself 
and, by extension, limited what you can 
ever accomplish. It’s easy (and fatuous) to 
scrawl “ANARCHY” on a wall without 
actually understanding the political theory 
behind it. Noam Chomsky, in his infinite 
wisdom, describes for us the ways in which 
we are manipulated by the media in subtle 
ways that are almost impossible to detect. 
Impossible, that is, unless you have a real 
understanding of history and government 
and the political process. Then, you can 
pick out the deceptions, see the subtle lies, 
and understand how to really change things. 
You want to know why most people in this 
country (and the rest of the world, for that 
matter) sit on their asses and complacently 
twiddle their thumbs while atrocities are 
committed in their name? You want to 
know why the population of this country 
buys the lies? It’s because they don’t have 
any idea, any idea at all. In every sense of 
the word. 

But I digress. Education money is 
thrown around in this country as though 
nickels were manhole covers. And no one 
cares, because the people who are getting 
fucked don’t have the knowledge to see it, 
and the people who are doing the fucking 
don’t want to give up the huge subsidy 
they’re giving to the spoiled whelps they 
send to “public” schools that received three 
times the money that other school districts 
receive. Not that I’m bitter. 

You want to know what’s wrong 
with this country? 

School. 

And maybe we’re all idiots for not 
seeing it sooner. 

Kerosene @ aol .com 



You don’t get a lot of chances 
in life to start over again, to reinvent 
yourself and make a new beginning. But 
going away to a new school - be it your 
freshman year of high school, or the start 
of your college career - is one of them. 
So I thought it might be useful this issue 
to give you a fable. 

This story was inspired by the 
great American humorist George Ade. 
For some reason, they don't seem to 
teach humor in school; I doubt you’ve 
ever been made to read anything by 
George Ade, Jean Shepherd, James 
Thurber, Dorothy Parker, or Ambrose 
Bierce for an English class, but that 
doesn’t mean you can’t go to the library 
and check out their books for yourself. 
Humorists put a different spin on the 
world, making the mundane seem sur- 
real and, more importantly, funny. And 
sometimes it helps to know that what 
seems like the worst moment of your life 
is something you'll laugh about a few 
years from now. Anyway, here’s our 
story; 

The Story Of The Plowhorse And The 
Thoroughbred 

Jack and John met for the first 
time on the first day of their freshman 
year at college, when they arrived at 
their dorm and discovered that the Ad- 
missions Dept, had decreed that they 
would be roommates. The two couldn’t 
have been more different; John came 
from a middle class family with a lot of 
children. His parents really couldn't 
afford college, but John spent most of his 
high school years studying his butt off, 
wound up valedictorian, and managed to 
win a small academic scholarship that 
paid part of his tuition. After he had sold 
his car and gotten a part-time job making 


pizzas during school, he just barely managed 
to scrape by. Jack, on the other hand, came 
from a rich suburban home but was going to 
college for free on a soccer scholarship. 

John spent most of his freshman 
year in the library, relentlessly studying and 
writing term papers - that is, when he wasn’t 
sweating bullets for minimum wage at the 
pizzeria. Jack hurt his knee the first week of 
practice, but the coach liked his spirit and 
anyway, he had a no-cut guaranteed schol- 
arship, so he was waived from practice and 
wound up with a lot of time on his hands. 
Since Jack was taking a light liberal arts 
curriculum, he wound up spending a lot of 
time at the campus radio station. At the end 
of freshman year, he decided to pledge Tau 
Kappa Kappa, the most popular fraternity 
on campus. All the frat brothers loved his 
easy going style and the girls went crazy 
over his scruffy good looks, so at the end of 
the pledge drive, he was unanimously voted 
into the fraternity by the other brothers. 

Sophomore year found John back 
in the dorms - all he could afford - and taking 
accelerated science and math courses to 
help speed along his studies. He missed the 
Sophomore Dance and Homecoming - the 
pizzeria put him on overtime to help cater a 
party at Tau Kappa Kappa, where Jack was 
elected the Social Chairman. At Christmas, 
John decided not to go home for the holidays 
and stayed on campus to cram for mid- 
terms. Jack went on a skiing trip to Aspen 
with his frat brothers. As the second semester 
began, John discovered he had aced all his 
courses, and Jack was elected Program Di- 
rector at the campus radip station. 

Junior year was a real grind for 
poor John. The pizzeria had gone out of 
business over the summer and the university 
had raised tuition, so he wound up working 
two part-time jobs, one in the campus caf- 
eteria as a busboy and another delivering 
Chinese food on a bicycle. Jack helped 
organize a concert for the radio station and 
managed to book the Lemonheads, Smash- 
ing Pumpkins, and Green Day. The concert 
was such a success that the dean appointed 
Jack head of the campus concerts commit- 
tee. John went on academic probation for 
missing two tuition payments in a row, but 
by the end of junior year, he had made 





s 



Dean’s List for the sixth straight semes- j 
ter. 

Senior year began as Jack was ' 
elected president of Tau Kappa Kappa 
and pulled off a real coup by booking 
Toad The Wet Sprocket and the Spin 
Doctors for Homecoming. In fact, he 
spent so much time on the concerts 
committee that he couldn’t finish his 
Senior Honors Thesis. Luckily, one of 
his frat brothers had a collection of old 
theses that alumni had left behind and 
Jack found one that was right up his , 
professor’s alley. He just had it retyped 
and put his name on it and got a B+. He 
graduated with a C+ average without 
actually opening a book his last three 
months of school. After pulling three 
consecutive all-nighters, John on the 
other hand aced all his finals and was 
chosen class Salutatorian, but missed 
Graduation because he had to work that 
day. 

John interviewed feverishly 
with prospective employers during the 
last months of senior year, but found the 
job market for biological science ma- 
jors wasn’t very good. One of Jack’s 
many girlfriends had an older brother 
who worked at Polygram Records and 
he hired Jack as a A&R man for $50,000 
with an expense account, company car, 
and points in any band he signed. He 
quickly signed a group that used to play 
parties at Tau Kappa Kappa who went 
on to have a gold record, which meant a 
hefty $100,000 bonus and promotion. 
John finally found a job as a research 
assistant for a pharmaceutical manu- 
facturer for $25,000 a year, but he had 
to relocate to Pittsburgh. 

Moral: There are at least two kinds of 
education. 

Pave 

Life is all about regret and anxi- 
ety and life is all about justice and re- 


wards. I believe in cosmic justice, and I 
believe that what goes around comes 
around. You will get what you deserve. 

So what do I have to say about 
school? All I have to say is, do what is best 
for you, and take each day as it comes. 

I was languishing behind the 
counter at Extreme Noise when two well- 
dressed young men came in with brief- 
cases. This isn’t so weird. Ever since we 
opened four months ago every kind of 
solicitor you might find on Lake St. has 
tried to peddle everything from flowers to 
glass cleanser. So I did my best job to look 
busy and hope that they’d just go away. 

Surprise, surprise. It doesn’t work, 
they cut right in. “Are you David? We 
were told you were the owner of this estab- 
lishment.” It’s been the established prac- 
tice that whenever anyone is trying to sell 
something to the business the owner is 
whoever isn’t in the room at the moment in 
the hopes that will force them to come back 
later. This is something like a cute joke. In 
no time at all it turns out they’re from the 
University Of Minnesota trying to sell ad 
spacein next year’s student directory. They 
start their shpeel. I do my best to look 
bored. “Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.” 

It’s amazing. They’re totally try- 
ing to work me, and I can’t even see how 
they might think we would shell out five 
hundred dollars to be in their lousy direc- 
tory. Bob and Joe are not unlike the insects 
I used to go to high school with who were 
guaranteed Fortune 500 positions with a 
little cloying and ass-kissing in their four 
years of college. I smile. I honestly 
believe that most members of my genera- 
tion will be cheated out of fulfillment. I 
can’t say that I’m too sorry. The goals of 
life dictated by the establishment aren’t 
too appealing to me. I know, how punk 
rock. There’s nothing intrinsically cre- 
ative or interesting about buying and sell- 
ing in of themselves. That’ s what capitalism 
is in America today, not the kind of capi- 
talism I was talking about in last column. I 
look at Bob and Joe again. The utter 
fakeness radiating from them is nauseat- 
ing, but at the same time I find it very 
appealing because it marks the difference 


li 


between us. We represent different 
powers. You know. I’m championing 
the kids and they’re trenching the man. 
Something like that. 

It isn’t to say that I'm not fake 
and that I’m not a liar. Iam. But when 
I am, I know it. To these two clods it’s 
part of “growing up’’ and “taking re- 
sponsibility”. The marriage of these 
two concepts is so utterly abominable to 
me I cannot even explain. I wonder 
what my two Aryan cohorts, with dreams 
of an evening at Hooters ahead of them 
(I imagine), think they’ll begetting out 
of all this. I mean if I’m playing a part, 
I’m doing it for a good reason. Today I 
told my supervisor my mother was ad- 
mitted to the hospital back in Connecti- 
cut causing me to have to take a leave of 
absence. “I’ll be gone for three weeks 
at the very most, I don’t know how you 
want to deal with this, but I’d like to 
return to my job when this crisis is 
over.” Truth be told, I’m actually going 
on tour, but that's a different story. The 
important thing is, I still have my job 
when I come back. 

It’s outrageous in a way. I 
hope all you readers are keeping track 
of my growing self-righteousness, be- 
cause it occurs to me that these “ambi- 
tious” well-dressed trackstars of 
tomorrow's golden future are violating 
my personal temple of the do-it-your- 
self ethic. Wince. Going too far? Don’t 
judge me too harshly, I just have a hard 
time imagining that selling ad space 
could be all that fulfilling, and that 
when I appear so totally disinterested 
and tell them to go on their way they 
have the audacity to try to play good 
cop, bad cop with me and romance me 
into a business venture “which will be 
good for you, and for the University.” 

You just pause for a moment 
and consider what all the kids would do 
if they had a punk rock conception of 
things behind them. I don't mean dress- 
ing mohican and speaking in a British 
accent, I just mean doing what you want 
to do and doing it yourself. A true 
concept of autonomy. I won’t pretend 
that I live up to such an ideal. 




it. To get to the core of the school issue, I 
dropped out of college for what seemed to 
me to be good reasons despite the warnings 
of my parents. “Oh yes, all this starts to 
make sense now.” you begin to think. 
Insecurity. Paranoia. Dementia. Guilt. 
But it isn’t only that, because that goes 
with the territory. All I can say is that in a 
lot of ways leaving school forced me to 
confront a lot of issues about what I wanted 
to be doing over the long haul and especially 
what my commitment to punk rock was all 
about. I won’t pretend it’s an either/or 
issue. It’s all about acquiring tools that 
you will use to do one thing or another. I 
expect that my current tenure in the 
underground will show me what a higher 
education will have to do with the rest of 
my following days. I can’t say that doing 
one thing or another is intrinsically the 
right thing to do, but following your true 
ambitions is definitely heading in the right 
direction. 

So I don’t know if I’m being a 
snob when I chuckle to myself as Bob and 
Joe scurry out of the store with their brief- 
cases behind them. It isn’t a matter of 
establishment versus anti-establishment or 
mainstream vs. alternative. It’s maybe 
clued-in versus clueless, or clueless and 
knowing it vs. clueless and not. I just know 
that I don’t regret not being in their shoes 
one iota. So yeah, see you later, pal. 
Adios. 

David Hake / P.O. Box 406 1 / St. Paul, MN 
55 104 / dhake@macalstr.edu 


Daniel 


In Chicago, the Fourth of July kicks 
off 3 days early. Starting around the first, 
people have their own fireworks displays in 
their backyards. These rage from small ro- 
man candle type jobs, to what sounds like 
sticks of dinomite. While I’m writing this, 
it seems like I’m living in a war zone. The 
strangest thing about it is that fireworks are 


illegal in Illinois (except sparklers and 
those little charcoal snakes), which 
means that at some point almost the 
entire population of Chicago made a 
mass exodus to Wisconsin or Indiana to 
buy fireworks. I can’t see how it can 
possibly be worth it. 

Anyway, I was with some 
friends Friday night, July 1st. We had 
just come from a movie and decided to 
sit up on a friends apartment building's 
roof. It was a hot night out, so sitting on 
the roof seemed like a good idea. There 
are chairs and tables out there just right 
for roof sittin', so why not? My friend 
has the most kick-ass aparment. That's 
probably because it's not hers, she's just 
there for the summer. Her roof has this 
fantastic view of the Chicago skyline: 
it's really magnificent, and no matter 
how hard I try, when I see it I can't help 
but be overwhelmed by the beauty of 
man's destrucion of nature. So we were 
sitting up there drinking in the view, and 
all of a sudden fireworks stalled jump- 
ing up from the buildings for as far as the 
eye could see. Not million dollar dis- 
plays or anything, but nice little poofs of 
color and sound. Maybe the beauty of it 
all was too much for us, or maybe we all 
were just in that kind of mood, but we 
started talking. 

Another person I was with had 
just come back from spending a semes- 
ter i n New Y ork City work i ng at a school , 
and hanging out with a lot of commu- 
nists. I don't remember how it hap- 
pened, but before any of us knew it, we 
were talking about education & empow- 
erment — well not all of us, Searah was 
talking to the cat. That conversation has 
started me thinking about education and 
the entire learning process. 

I honestly can't think of 10 
things I learned in school that have helped 
me in real life. I knew how to read before 
I stalled school (hell, I even knew how 
to whistle before I started school). Al- 
though 1 did learn basic math skills I've 
hated math ever since 3rd grade when I 
memorized all my times tables and still 
wasn’t allowed to go into the fourth 
grade mathbook. Middle school taught 
me that success was bad, and popularity 


was everything (suprisingly enough I see 
those same values espoused everyday in 
punk rock). High school taught me that you 
can flunk gym if you wear the wrong shorts. 
You can flunk Spanish, math, journalism, 
almost anything and nothing happens, but 
if you flunk gym, you can’t graduate. 

School, on the whole was a bad 
experience for me. I don’t, however, think 
that I shouldn’t have gone. There were a 
few good experiences along the way, and 
those experiences probably had more to do 
with making me who I am than almost 
anything else in my life. 

Every good experience I had in 
school was somehow related not to an as- 
signment or a lesson, but to a teacher that let 
me do what I wanted. When a teacher has 
given me a project that has just a small 
amount of requirements, I’ll learn about 
things I want to know about (I can remem- 
ber a paper I wrote my freshman year of 
highschool on performance art) or things I 
don’t want to know about (I did an interac- 
tive computer piece on wind power once), 
and I’ll do it well and have it in on time, and 
I will have learned a lot (I still know a bunch 
about alternative fuels from that wind power 
assignemt I did 6 years ago). 

I learn by doing, and the best way 
to teach me is to give me the tools to do 
things. I think that most people, when given 
the chance, would learn best that way. It’s 
learning through empowerment. Instead of 
telling someone to press button A and the 
light goes on, you show them HOW button 
A turns the light on. Then you let them build 
it. It’s the fish theory. Give a man a fish, 
he’ 11 eat for a day, teach him how to fish and 
he’ll eat forever (for those of you that don’t 
know, that saying was around before a half 
way decent hip-hop band popularized it). 

My senior year of high school was 
probably one of the most important years of 
my life so far. First because I was madly in 
love, second because I lost a lot of my 
friends because I disagreed with the way 
they were handling a situation (this incedent 
actually came back into play that night on 
the roof, but I am promising myself that I 
won’t turn this into a PLP bashing fest), and 
third because two teachers gave me the run 
of the Evanston Township High School 
computer center. Without one teacher let- 




ting me miss most of her classes, and 
another teacher letting me use the com- 
puter center whenever I wanted, I think 
it is a pretty safe bet to say that this 
magazine wouldn’t exist today. I spent 2 
periods a day in there (not counting the 
times I ditched otherclasses to got there); 
and once I had split with my friends, I 
spent my lunchtime there too. I taught 
myself how to use computers, programs, 
different kinds of hardware, everything. 

1 spent so much time there that some 
teachers actually had me teach them 
how to use the programs! Since I gradu- 
ated high school, I have gone on to apply 
what I learned in that room into a number 
of different things; some have made 
money for me, and some (this magazine 
included) have created an outlet for me 
to spend that same money. 

Now why am 1 talking about 
this so much? Do I want to sell everyone 
on the wonder and salability of com- 
puter skills? No, I’m giving this as an 
example. If instead of being given free 
reign of how I learned computers, and 
what I did with them, I was given 
worksheets and assignments, I wouldn’t 
have been interested. I wouldn’t be writ- 
ing this now, and I would probably (as 
Jim Connell likes to say) be selling in- 
surance, which would prove to be a 
problem, since I dropped out of Cub 
Scouts because I couldn’t tie a tie. 

Unfortunatly, our educational 
system doesn’t work like that. It seems 
designed to break people’s wills with 
workbooks and memorization. Busy- 
work is king in the US. It takes a very 
special teacher to rise above the norm 
and allow kids to use their minds. I was 
lucky and had a few of those teachers in 
my time. 

Sometimes I think I’d like to 
repay the favor and become a teacher 
myself. Sometimes I don’t think I could 
take the amount of bullshit that a teacher 
has to put up with. I don’t think that I’ll 
ever become a teacher in a school, there’s 
too much buracracy, lesson plans, and 
snotty kids. I try to teach in other ways 
though. If people want to know how to 
do something, all they need to do is ask, 
I'll sit down with them & show them 


how, and then let them go at it themselves. 

It’s interesting, I think, to see how 
much of the DIY ethic can really be applied 
to teaching and education. I learned how to 
use computers by doing it myself. There 
was no one there to even show me how to 
turn the damn thing on! Obviously, not 
everything can be learned in that way, if I 
ever have to have an operation, I want to be 
damn sure that the doctor isn’t just figuring 
things out as she goes along. But I also want 
to be sure that that doctor has an ability to 
think on her feet, something that work- 
books and instructions can never do. 

Another way that I learn (and I 
think most people learn -but don’t want to) 
is by making mistakes. I’ve made a ton in 
my time and hope that with each one I have 
grown. Sure, some have inflicted wounds 
that still hurt today, but for the most part, 
mistakes are apart of life and you have to 
make them. 

A friend of mine has been talking 
about nothing but going to Italy for about a 
year now. He has fallen in love and isn’t 
going away anymore. I had written him a 
pretty nasty letter, telling him that he was 
fucking up his life, and he should be going 
to Italy, and I couldn’t even believe that he 
would even consider not going, and doesn’t 
he know that some people don’t have the 
luxury of ever going away to Italy, and who 
was he to just decide, on a whim, not to go. 

I never sent the letter to him. I never even 
printed it out. f realized that he has to figure 
out for himself whether or not he made the 
right decision, and either way, he will have 
grown from the entire experience. He is not 
afraid to make a mistake (not to say that he 
is). I wish that was true for everyone. Some 
people live in perpetual fear of making a 
mistake, and end up doing nothing forever. 

Now’s the time where I eat a few 
of my words. Last issue, I made a mistake. 
Apparently, the Jewel prank that I blamed 
entirely on Chicago anarchists, wasn’ t pulled 
off by the anarchists alone. They took part, 
but apparently, so did others. That still 
doesn’t change my opinion that the entire 
idea was thoughtless and counterproduc- 
tive, though. It just means that next time I 
will think twice before making a quick 
generalization. It means I made a mistake 
and have learned from it. 


Larry 


llhrermorel 


Spike Anarkie Goes To Kollidj 

The punk world has been abuzz 
with the reappearance of the legendary 
Spike Anarkie. You may recall that 
when we last heard from Spike he had set 
off on an epic cross-country journey to 
do battle with his arch-rival, Felix von 
Havoc. The two ultroids had been trad- 
ing insults back and forth across the 
subterranean grapevine, and finally found 
themselves locked in mortal combat for 
bragging rights as “punkest of da 
punkazfux.” 

As fate would have it however, the 
ferocious winds of winter were starting 
to sweep down from the north as the 
blows began to fly, and before anyone 
could say, “Fuck this, let's go get some 
beer," Felix and Spike were frozen, for- 
ever, we thought, into a striking tableau 
which an enterprising University of 
Minnesota art student turned into her 
senior project and had installed in a quiet 
corner of the campus. 

She graduated with honors and 
moved away to New York City where 
she got an NEA grant to pursue her new 
concept of bronzing bums who fell asleep 
on the subway. Meanwhile Felix and 
Spike spent the winter buried beneath a 
two-story deep snowdrift and were soon 
completely forgotten. 

Unfortunately, the student had ne- 
glected to install any kind of plaque or 
sign to indicate that the iced punkers 
were in reality a piece of art. When 
spring came, a janitor ran across them 
and, unable to figure what else do, carted 
them off to the junkyard. “They looked 
sort of human, I guess," he said later, 
“but with all those chains and spikes, I 
figured scrap metal was a better bet." 

And that would have been the end of 
that, a shabby conclusion to a sordid life, 
except there proved to be more resil- 

<CniL^ Aniirkip_±hiin unvnmv 




A 



ever have dreamed. Maybe it was the 
blood alcohol level, maybe the thick layer of 
leather and crust that enveloped him, but for 
some reason, Spike survived his winter- 
long ordeal. As the warm Minnesota sun 
spread its fleeting summer warmth over his 
recumbent form, Spike stretched lazily, and 
in doing so, frightened off the cloud of flies 
that had begun to congregate on and around 
him. 

He also gave the fright of her life to one 
Buffy Warrington, a sweet but not espe- 
cially bright sorority girl who hadn’t opened 
a book in three years, but was nonetheless a 
straight-A student and president of her se- 
nior class. Only jealous people and meanies 
wondered if that had anything to do with the 
fact that her father, “Buck” Warrrington IV 
had given seven million dollars to the uni- 
versity. 

Normally Buffy would have been chill- 
ing over at the frat house with her boyfriend 
Brad, but she was in a real tizzy today. She 
had recently gotten involved in the punk 
movement as a result of seeing Samiam play 
at a local night club. Inspired by their raw 
energy and defiant, anti-authoritarian atti- 
tudes, she had immediately gone home and 
dyed her hair green and pierced her nose. 

It was the most daring thing she had 
ever done, but she hadn’t been prepared to 
the pay the price that conformist American 
society exacts from its outcasts and rebels. 
Her boyfriend Brad had dumped her, her 
sorority sisters refused to talk to her, and her 
I ittle brother kept calling her “spinach-head.” 
And as if that weren’t enough, her professor 
had taken her aside that morning and warned 
her that if she didn’t produce her report on 
Social Deviance in the American Underclass 
by tomorrow, she wasn’t going to graduate. 

“The nerve of that man,” she was think- 
ing as she stomped her petulant little way 
across campus, quite unaware of where she 
was going until she stumbled over the still 
partly comatose Spike. 

“Hey, watch where the fuck you’re 
going!” he yelled, but not being fully awake 
yet, he didn’t sound nearly as mean as he 
usually does. In fact, to poor confused 
Buffy, he seemed almost sweet. And what’s 
more, she thought excitedly, he looked like 
a real punk, not one of those trendy-come- 
lately s who didn’t get into punk until Jawbox 


Spike, on the other hand, was too 
bleary-eyed to notice that Buffy was a bit 
too clean and sparkly to fit his definition 
of a punk. She was the kind of girl, in fact, 
who if he were in his normal state of 
mind, he'd be following across campus 
yelling “Poser!” until he made her cry. 

The other thing was that a lot of time 
had passed and a lot of things had changed 
during the time Spike had been frozen. 
Now there were punk-looking people like 
Buffy everywhere. Spike even thought 
for a minute that he had died and gone to 
punk heaven, until he looked around and 
didn't see any beer. 

Buffy went and got him a couple of 
forties, thrilled* to be waiting on a real 
punk. Once he had gotten some of his 
vital sustenance. Spike quickly returned 
to his usual form, i.e., mean, loud, rude, 
and flamboyantly ignorant. Buffy was 
loving it. 

She thought about using Spike to 
make Brad jealous, but then she got an 
even better idea. He would be perfect for 
her Social Deviance project! She wouldn't 
even have to write a report; she could just 
bring him in and interview him in front of 
the class! 

Spike was up for it, as long as there 
was more beer, and since Buffy' s monthly 
allowance was more than Spike had lived 
on for the previous five years, there was 
sure to be no shortage of that. So they set 
off back to Buffy’s sorority house, where 
she snuck Spike in through the window 
and hid him in the basement. 

Things were looking just fine until 
Buffy found out that her fascist professor 
wanted references and footnotes. “I don’t 
want you just dragging some garden va- 
riety bum off the street and calling him a 
social deviant," he told her. “You have to 
show me published material from a repu- 
table journal of anthropology or sociol- 
ogy to demonstrate that this person repre- 
sents a genuine and recognized social 
problem.” 

When Spike heard this, he was all in 
favor of going over and kicking the 
professor’s ass. “Who does this college 
poser think he is, saying I'm not a social 
problem?” he bellowed in outrage. 


ing the professor’s ass would not help her 
graduate, and Spike didn’t really want her to 
be stuck in this sorority house for the rest of 
her life, did he? “Aren’t there some books 
or articles about people like you that we 
could show the professor?” she asked. 

Spike laughed in disbelief. “Dude, I’m 
like totally famous! They write about me all 
the time in Maximum Rocknroll!” 

“Yes, but this Maximum Rocknroll, is 
it a recognized journal of anthropology or 
sociology?” she insisted. 

“Yeah, sure, whatever. Got any more 
beer.” 

As the night wore on and time grew 
short, Buffy’s desperation increased. Fi- 
nally she got a brainstorm about how she 
might be able to get away with using this 
Maximum whatever it was magazine as a 
reference. Spike had told her about the 
super-secret MRR central computer hidden 
in the basement of the magazine’s San 
Francisco headquarters. “Dude, they’ve got 
files on everything that was ever punk stored 
up in that computer. I bet they got a whole 
section just about me,” he bragged. 

Well, it so happened that Buffy’ s bratty 
13 year-old brother Benjamin was an ac- 
complished hacker, and she got him to break 
into the MRR computer and download the 
Spike Anarkie file. Sure enough, it filled up 
many pages, containing more than enough 
information to show that Spike was a 
bonafide social deviant and general menace 
to society. And with all the information 
printed up in fancy computerized form, it 
looked impressive enough to convince the 
professor to let her use Spike as her senior 
project. 

Everything probably would have gone 
well from there on out if Buffy hadn’t made 
the mistake of letting Spike stay up all night 
drinking more beer. In the morning she 
practically had to carry him to class. She 
dumped him onto a chair in front of the 
blackboard, and started her report. 

“The young man you see in front of you 
presents a complex social problem,” she 
said. “Misunderstood by society, and mis- 
understanding his own role in the scheme of 
things, he has turned to a life of nihilism and 
self-negation. By observing poor Mr. 
Anarkie, we can learn...” At this point she 



giggled and snickered. 

Spike was stumbling out his chair, 
mumbling something about another forty. 
Buffy hissed at him to sit still and be 
quiet, but he was oblivious. Staggering 
forward, he crashed into the front row of 
desks, and landed on top of two terrified 
foreign exchange students. As they 
screamed and tried to get out from under 
him, he opened his mouth and unleashed 
a copious stream of puke. A moment 
later, he passed out and started snoring 
loudly. 

Well, as you might suspect, Buffy 
did not pass her class, did not graduate, 
and in fact left college in disgrace. Her 
experience with Spike soured her on the 
punk movement, and she ended up mov- 
ing to Fargo, North Dakota, where she 
got involved with that city’s flourishing 
country-grunge scene that a lot of people 
are predicting will be the next big craze 
to sweep the country. 

And that would have been the end of 
that, had it not been for one of those 
weird computer mixups that seem to be 
happening more and more these days. It 
seems thar when Spike’s MRR data was 
entered into the university files, it some- 
how got crossed with the academic 
records of Jeff Bale, a former MRR writer 
and Berkeley Ph.D. who was looking for 
a job as a professor. 

No one knows exactly how the error 
happened, but the net result was that 
Jeff s name was added to the uni versity ’ s 
list of dangerous social deviants, and. 
Spike was offered a position as Professor 
of Anarchy. When a delegation of uni- 
versity officials came to tell Spike the 
good news, he was still lying on the floor 
of the now-vacant classroom, and he was 
not a pretty sight. 

Nevertheless, many educators lead 
eccentric lifestyles, and the university 
president was happy to see that Professor 
Anarkie was a younger man who looked 
as though he’d be able to relate well to 
the students. Spike was provided with 
his own office and his own refrigerator 
full of beer, and told he had all summer to 
kick back and prepare for classes that 
fall. 


students or alumni gather, they still talk 
about that September morning when Spike 
faced his first room full of fresh-faced un- 
dergraduates. 

Just back from an all-night session of 
drinking and pit-moshing, Spike stumbled 
into the classroom and greeted the wide- 
eyed students with a leer. “Good morning, 
posers, I’m Professor Anarkie,” he began. 

“You’re probably wondering why 
you’re here. So am I, actually. College is 
for losers and that rhymes with posers. Well, 
it almost does. Anyway, today we’re going 
to learn about the theory of chaos.” 

“Is that the same thing as chaos theory?” 
asked one eager beaver. “We studied about 
that in summer session. 

“No, poser. And what kind of dork 
goes to summer school anyway? There’s 
only one thing to know about the theory of 
chaos, and it goes like this. Some old fart 
French philosopher once said, ‘I think, 
therefore I am.’ Drunk punks say, T drink, 
therefore I am.’ Crusties say, ‘I stink, 
therefore I am.’ But chaos punks say, ‘I 
smash the bottle, therefore I am.’” 

With that, Spike reached under his desk 
for one of the forties he had stored under his 
desk for emergencies, and sharply cracked 
it across his own forehead, instantly shatter- 
ing it and sending a spray of blood and beer 
across the entire front of the room. He 
crumpled to the floor and lay there in a 
stupor, lifting his head just long enough to 
proclaim, “Free beer for everyone, under 
my desk. Live the chaos!” 

Once they had gotten over their initial 
shock (and drunk a lot of his beer), the 
students took a great liking to Professor 
Anarkie. And college freshmen being the 
impressionable lot that they are, the cult of 
chaos punk was soon sweeping across cam- 
pus. Everywhere you saw students with 
bloody and bandaged foreheads, proudly 
carrying the j agged remnants of empty forty- 
ouncers. Professor Anarkie’s class was 
extraordinarily well-attended, and at first 
the administration was thrilled that the new 
man was so popular with his students. But 
they started having their doubts when the 
police had to be called several times to break 
up brawls. 

Still, change happens at a glacial pace 


November before any serious questions 
started to be raised about Professor 
Anarkie’s unusual teaching methods. 
Almost every other class, it seemed, 
would feature an appearance by very 
loud and ill-mannered hardcore bands 
with names like Society’s Death Wish 
and Brutal Desperate Destruction which 
would make it impossible for any other 
teachers in the building to be heard. And 
more often than not, Spike would cancel 
the regular class and tell the students that 
they should meet instead at a parking lot 
behind a local 7-11 where they would 
break things and yell at fat suburban 
ladies when they. passed by. 

The last straw, though, came when 
Spike told the class, now grown to more 
than 700 students, that today was Inter- 
national Chaos Day, and that it had to be 
observed by reducing the entire univer- 
sity to ultimate chaos. The students were 
a little hesitant until he told them that 
they were being graded on the amount of 
destruction they achieved, and with that 
they went swirling out in a vast unruly 
mob, turning over desks, setting profes- 
sors’ beards on fire, pouring beer into the 
campus water supply. It was the worst 
disorder the university had known since 
the protests of the 1960s. Professor 
Anarkie was called in for a meting. 

“Dude, my students are just protest- 
ing against the emptiness of capitalist 
consumer conformist society,” he 
sneered. 

“Well, yes,” replied the university 
president thoughtfully, “and we’re glad 
they’re confronting the issues facing our 
modern world. But couldn’t they write a 
paper about it instead?” 

"Papers? Fuck papers! What about 
the people that can’t read or write very 
good. You can't use your phony intellec- 
tual values to suppress and cover up the 
true chaos of the people!” 

“Hmm. I think I see your point, 
Professor Anarkie. But there must be 
some way that we can keep these situa- 
tions from getting out of hand.” 

“Hey, president dude, you have to 
lighten up and live some chaos yourself,” 
said Spike, who was in quite a jolly mood 





kind of recognition he had always suspected 
he deserved. “Have a couple beers with 
me!” 

The president didn’t usually drink, but 
he thought it might be a good idea just this 
once, to try and achieve some rapport with 
this fiery young professor. Several forties 
later, still in his now-tattered cap and gown, 
he was moshing in the pit at a local anarchist 
dive and laughing every time Spike bounced 
a bottle off the lead singer’s incredibly thick 
skull. 

It looked as though the entire Univer- 
sity of Minnesota was on the verge of being 
converted into America’ s first all-chaos punk 
college, and it probably would have, if it 
hadn’t been for one particularly persistent 
professor of computer science, who had 
started asking questions about the mysteri- 
ous origins of Professor Anarkie, and didn’t 
like the answers he was getting. 

It was he who finally discovered the 
error that had installed Spike Anarkie in his 
prestigious position, and he who took the 
information to the Board of Regents and the 
Governor of Minnesota, begging them to so 
something about this dangerous interloper 
who was making a mockery of the state’s 
entire program of higher education. Since 
the university president himself had by now 
dropped out to go on tour with a hardcore 
band, outside authorities had to step in, and 
by the time the first snows of a new winter 
were falling, Spike had been demoted from 
professor back down to permanent loser, 
and shipped back, in a sealed train, to his 
ancestral home of Berkeley, California. 

The University of Minnesota has now 
more or less returned to normal, and when 
last seen, Spike was back hanging out in 
Berkeley, scrounging change from the tour- 
ists to buy beer. His adventures in the 
academic world seem to have left him re- 
markably unspoiled, and he shows few signs 
of putting on airs by virtue of being a “college 
man.” 

Word has it that he was offered a mil- 
lion dollars for the rights to his story by 
some company the wanted to make a movie 
about him called “The Punk Professor.” But 
supposedly he turned it down because he 
found out that the movie cameras they were 
going to use were made by a big corporation, 


million dollar check at a bank, which 
is part of the system that he doesn’t 
support. 

So instead, true to his punk ideals, 
Spike sits outside the Bank of America 
on Telegraph Avenue yelling at people 
about what posers they are for conform- 
ing to society’s roles. Because of his new 
notoriety. Spike has become possibly the 
most successful spare changer in Tele- 
graph history; everyone wants to give a 
little something to the ultimate chaos 
punk. Young people flock to learn at his 
feet; in fact clusters of Spike’s disciples 
can now be seen gathering at various 
spots throughout the south campus. 

As for Spike himself, he’s still not 
willing to abandon his long-standing 
contention that school is only for posers, 
but if you catch him in one of his rare 
quiet moments, he just might admit that 
education has its value. "The trouble is,” 
he contends, “most people ain’t smart 
enough to know how to put it to good 
use.” 

Unsolicited plug and/or public service 
announcement: if you'd like to read more of 
the adventures of Spike Anarkie, or more of 
Larry Livermore s opinions and writings on a 
multitude of subjects, you might want to send 
for the new issue of Lookout magazine {#$9). 
It ’s 4S pages, costs $2, and you can get it by 
writing to PO Box / 1374, Berkeley CA 947/2. 





Here are the three things I know how to 
do: 

Make chocolate Truffles 
Make Indian Pudding 
Calculate a star’s distance from 
the Sun using its stellar parallax as seen 
from Earth. 

Unfortunately, I don’t have the recipes for 
the first two on me, so you’re stuck with 
the third. 

1 . Go out and find a star, and using a high 


powered telescope, take a picture of it. In- 
clude as many of the stars immediately sur- 
rounding it as possible. 

2. Wait 6 months. 

3. Take another picture, again including as 
many of the stars around it as possible. 

4. Next, using subtle astronomical tech- 
niques, determine how much your star has 
shifted against the background of the stars. It 
should be a very minute amount. That is to 
say: only a few seconds of arc (FYI, a circle 
has 360 degrees. A degree can be divided 
into 60 minutes. A minute can be divided 
into 60 seconds. 

Here’s a picture 



time A plus 6 months 

5. Next, take an imaginative leap into hy- 
perspace and find yourself upon your star 
(this is my favorite part). 

6. Draw a circle around yourself, the circum- 
ference of the circle must pass through the 
Earth at points Time A and Time A + six 
months. 

7. Now: you know the distance in seconds 
from Earth at Time A to Earth at Time A + 
6 months. Let’s say, for simplicity’s sake, 
that it’s 10 seconds of arc. 

Y ou also know the distance in miles 
from Earth at Time A to Earth at Time A + 
6 months; 2 x 93,000,000 miles or 

186.000. 000 miles (you remember learning 
that the approximate distance between the 
Earth and Sun is 93,000,000 miles, right?). 

And you know the circumference 
of the circle around your star is 360 degrees, 
or 1,296,000 seconds. 

Using these three bits of informa- 
tion you can figure out the circumference of 
the circle in miles. If 10 seconds is equiva- 
lent to 186,000,000 miles, then 1,296,000 
seconds must be equivalent to 

24.105.600.000. 000 miles (Divide 126,000 
by 10 and multiply the result by 186,000,000). 




A 


@Columns 




First, a little background. I had a 
pretty standard K-12 education. My high 
school years were spent in a relatively small, 
upper-middle-class suburban New York 
public school. Back then (the 60’ s), educa- 
tion was pretty straight-forward — every 
year there was math, science, social studies, 
English, and a foreign language, plus the 
usual assortment of shop, phys-ed, lunch, 
and other such filler. There weren’t really 
many electives; pretty much everyone took 
everything. I don’t know whether that was 
because I went to a small school, or if it was 
just the way things were done back then. 

The single most valuable thing I got 
out of high school was the ability to write. 
We had a lot of writing assignments — ten 
page papers were the standard assignment in 
most classes. And by doing it, I learned how. 
Ten page papers also taught me the fine art of 
putting things off until the absolute last 
minute, a lesson that lasted until well into my 
first semester of college. 

But back to writing... I’ve had a 
bunch of jobs, run a couple of businesses, 
and done lots of other stuff over the years, 
and I’ve noticed that 1) being able to write 
well has helped in almost everything I’ve 
done, and 2) most people can’t put two sen- 
tences together, even otherwise well-edu- 
cated, professional people. It doesn’t matter 
if you want to be an environmental engineer 
or a floral designer; if you can write you’re 
miles ahead of most everyone else. ' 

Other high school subjects I’ve 
found useful over the years include math 
(especially geometry, believe it or not), how 
to use the library, and commercial 
dishwashing. That’s pretty much it. 

In the years since high school I’ve 
also gained an appreciation of just how cruel 
the whole process is. No one can torture 
another human being quite as well as a 7th- 
grader can. And there seems to be some sort 
of natural-selection process which steers the 
smallest-minded, most pompous, boneheaded 
bureaucratic assholes in the universe into 
high school administrative positions. Some 
teachers are saints; many more are pathetic 
fucked-up losers, and they ’ re all role models. 

Nonetheless, I survived, and made 
it to college. Within two months I had 1) 
learned how to ride a motorcycle, 2) bought 
one, 3) bought a leather jacket, and 4) started 
to grow my hair long. In other words, I was 
discovering myself. And my writing skills 


had already started to pay off; the 10-page 
letter I wrote to my parents explaining 
why I *HAD* to have a motorcycle was 
one of my finest works. 

In that first semester of college, 1 
learned the lesson which has probably had 
the most impact on my future: almost 
anything can be put off until *well past* 
the absolute last minute, if not forever, 
without anything bad happening. 

Anyhow, by my third year of 
college it was clear that higher education 
was a lost cause, and I dropped out. It 
happened like this. I was taking this course 
in Water Supply Engineering, and half- 
way through the term the professor gives 
the class an assignment that consisted of a 
real-life problem: predict the water-sup- 
ply needs of a nearby small town (Saline, 
MI), for the next thirty years. It slowly 
sunk in to the class that there was NO 
RIGHT ANSWER and they panicked. It 
was absolute chaos for the entire class. I 
was kind of in shock myself, because I 
realized that no one there was capable of 
having an original thought, and the whole 
idea absolutely terrified them. 

I went to the professor after the 
class and had a long talk, and he suggested 
that I might not be cut out for the academic 
world. It wasn't really criticism; I hink he 
saw some sort of unwillingness to con- 
form that he thought had value and that 
would not survive engineering school. 
Maybe I'm just rationalizing. But I’ve- 
thought back on that experience many 
times, and I think I was steered in the right 
direction by someone who understood. 

It's also interesting to note that, 
many years later, my parents still have not 
given up hope that 1 will get my degree, 
and still bring it up almost every time I see 
them. Most parents mean well, and I'm 
sure mine do, but it took me years of guilt 
to realize that they DON'T have my best 
interests in mind. They have a script in 
their heads of who I should be. It was 
probably written before I was born. It 
doesn't have ANYTHING to do with who 
I really am or what I really want out of my 
life. They can have their little fantasy, and 
I'll still love them just as much, but I won't 
compromise myself for the sake of their 
dreams, and I won't feel guilty about it. 

There are huge holes in my 





A 


^Columns 


cation. I wish I knew more about phi- 
losophy, history, literature, stuff like that. I 
hated learning about them when they were 
offered; perhaps I wasn’t ready, or perhaps 
what was being taught wasn’t what inter- 
ested me. My one remaining memory of 
literary education is having to read The Great 
Gatsby, which I absolutely loathed. 

I also keep wishing I understood 
the things that were supposedly being taught 
in math, science, and engineering classes. 
The problem is that what I want is an intui- 
tive, practical understanding of how things 
work (which is beautiful when you can get to 
it). The schools, however, weigh the under- 
lying concepts down with so much crap that 
the beauty is lost completely. Calculus, for 
example, is based oh extremely simple and 
totally relevant concepts — everyone should 
understand it, and everyone could. But vir- 
tually nobody needs to know how to do it, or 
how to prove that it is mathematically 
consistant, and that’s basically all you’ll learn 
in school. Am I bitter? Take a wild guess. 

One last reflection on all this stuff. 

I can look back and see, and NONE of the 
stuff that I though was important turned out 
to be. EVERYTHING that had a big impact 
on my life was unplanned, and didn’t seem 
important at the time. 

Grades and SAT scores? I don’t 
remember and nobody asks. College? I got 
into a very good school — but the most 
valuable courses I’ve taken over the years 
(including the calculus course that taught me 
the intuitive beauty of it) were taken at 
community colleges. Nobody asks me about 
my education, it’s not on my resume, and a 
good way to keep from working for assholes 
is to stay far away from people who care 
about such things. 



THU 

E 

sen 


I’ve reached the point where I think 
that no one understands me. Everyone has a 
different view point on me. Some say I’m a 
cynic, some say I never take anything seri- 
ously, others say I’m a simpleton, while 
others say I’m bright, then there’s people 


who think I’ m an asshole, or a loser or shy, 
anything, but basically they're all wrong. 
The issue isn't that I’m too complex to 
understand (that would be flattering if 
true, but it’s not), it's just that I don't think 
that many people have the same views in 
life as I do (I don’t know if that's good or 
bad...). I try to spend my time combating 
what I hate or don’t like. For example one 
of the main driving forces in my life is that 
1 hate dishonesty. That means that 1 am 
always truthful with people unless I have 
sworn to someone else to lie for them or 1 
think they need to be lied for. This also 
means that 1 dislike when people lie. I 
don’t try and stop people from lying. I’m 
not some militant freak about it. I just 
don't like it. The way I see it is that we'll 
never get anywhere if we don’t tell each 
other the truth, because there’s no point in 
telling someone a lie. For this same reason 
1 hate that little common pleasantry called 
“small talk.’’ Small talk drives me insane. 
The thought of wasting time to talk to 
someone about something that neither 
person cares about seems really foolish to 
me. My almost complete refusal to take 
part in small talk often brands me as shy, 
but that's not wholly true. I will speak my 
mind about as much as 1 think is necessary 
if I think there's a point in me saying it. 
For example when someone asks me, “Hot 
enough for you?” I will just respond, 
“Yeh...” and walk away. I’m not gonna 
start talking about how hot last summer 
was and comparing things or anything 
because it's stupid and it wastes everyone 
involved’s time. This means I often come 
off as being shy, but I’m really not. If I call 
someone up from a record company or 
something because of some Punk Planet 
thing I can talk to them for awhile because 
I’m interested in what they have to say 
about records, tours, punk in general, or 
anything else. That's because I want to 
talk to them and see what they think and I 
often talk to them longer then my phone 
bill should let me. But that just proves that 
I’m not shy, I just hate bullshit and lies. 

What I especially dislike is 
“phonies.” Anyone who’s read Catcher in 
the Rve should know what I’m talking 
about. I hate people who pretend to be 
something they’re not. That's why a lot of 
the time people think that I’m unhappy, 



but that’s not true. Just because I don’t walk 
around smiling all the time doesn’t mean that 
I’m sad. It just means I don’t have anything 
to smile about and I’m content. If I was sad 
you could tell that because it’d be obvious 
just like a smile is an obvious way to tell that 
someone is happy (or pretending to be). 

Another thing that pisses me off a 
lot are some things in the punk scene, both 
national and (mainly) local. If it weren’t for 
the fact that I hated MRR’ s new policies then 
I never would have tried to head this zine up. 
I hated the fact that there weren’t many cool 
punk bands that came here to Birmingham, 
so I started setting up shows for them and am 
looking into starting an underground club. I 
also hated the fact that there wasn’t very 
much small label stuff being sold at the only 
cool record store in town so I started distrib- 
uting some records here that otherwise 
wouldn’ t have ever been seen here (I’m going 
to stop doing this on a large scale soon and 
cut down to a just for friends thing though). 
Not because of the fact that things have 
gotten better (although they have to some 
degree). It’s because I’ve decided that the 
Birmingham scene is not worth me risking 
money on whether or not it will get to see a 
small label’s release). The fact that I hate all 
the aforementioned things gets me branded a 
cynic a lot of the time, but that’s not right at 
all. When I see something I don’t like I try to 
change it for the better and I look to the future 
with hope that I can help make this a better 
world. In reality I’m an optimist, but I do not 
like the present. 

My views are mainly built on hate 
(I use that word, but dislike is better because 
I don’ t really hate anything), but they all work 
towards improvement and therefor the views 
are also built on love. They are built on the 
love of my dream of a good future. No one 
seems to really understand this, but that’s ok 
I guess. As long as I know where I’m coming 
from maybe someday I’ll meet someone 
who’s coming from the same direction, or at 
least knows where it is. I doubt it, but I can 
be hopeful and if you ever meet me and I 
seem cynical or shy try digging below the 
surface and that’s where you’ll find the real 
me. If you wanna write me adress it to the 
southern branch of this zine or by e-mail at 
“WillDandyl@aol.com” Thanks for listen- 
ing. 






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CDs = $10.00, 7"s = $ 3.00 each, ppd. 
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Oregon 


So the big news in Portland is that the X-Ray 
Cafe (y’know, that world famous all-ages 
club once featured in Sassy, location of the 
infamous Anarchist convention/media me- 
lee of 1993, home-for-a-night to thousands 
of touring bands and the historic site of many 
incredible shows) will be closing down at 
the end of this summer. It seems that Ben and 
T res (our beloved proprietors) have run into 
a larger than necessary debt. That, teamed up 
with the energy and time required to book 
thousands of bands as well as trying to have 
a private life has apparently led to the unfor- 
tunate downfall of this once majestic mecca 
of culture. So now the question arises as to 
where bands will go to play the much-valued 
all-ages shows Portland’s scene thirsts for... 
Yeah, there is La Luna, the biggest club in 
town, reportedly under contract with MCA 
Concerts (yes, that MCA), but for a lot of 
smaller bands starting out, that doesn’ t equal 
reality. Then there’s the Madrona Hill 
Winery, which does some all-ages shows, 
but nowhere near as consistently as the X-Ray 
did. Everyone seems to be crossing their 
fingers and hoping that someone with some 
money and a lot of energy will take over the 
Portland underground all-ages scene. There 
is one rumor running around of someone’s 
father renting out a warehouse for all-ages 
shows, and hopefully it’s a true one. 

Until then, there’s always the 
Powerhouse, an incredibly cool basement 
belonging to some very cool punk rockers. 
These folks at the powerhouse have been 
putting on shows since early spring. Some 
bands who have played there: Rancid, 
Blackfork, Dead and Gone, Ground 


Round, Ten-O-Seven, Christie Front 
Drive, Siren, Sparkmarker, and many 
more. The shows were going great until 
about a week ago when the Powerhouse 
received an official noise complaint from 
the city of Portland. Unfortunately, the noise 
ordinance is in effect at all hours (as opposed 
to after 10:00 PM like most places), and the 
noise must not travel more than 50 feet. So, 
until the issue of soundproofing is dealt with 
more sufficiently, some shows have been 
cancelled and/or put on hold temporarily. 
Not to worry, though. The folks at the 
Powerhouse will fix the problem. Their 
number is (503) 287-7DOA, call ‘em if 
you’re heading this way. 

If you’re going southward of here, 
don’t worry, there is life below Portland. 
Salem has been doing some shows, one of 
which was Jawbreaker.Haven’t heard much 
more about it, though. 

It seems like every scene should 
have hard-working individuals like Tim 
Davenport of the Corvallis fanzine appro- 
priately titled, well... ZINE. Tim publishes 
what is probably the main artery of the 
Corvallis punk/underground scene. Zine is 
a locally free bi-monthly publication full of 
numerous interviews and tid-bits of info all 
about this not-so-distant college town. All of 
it is packed together in a wonderfully laid 
out 8 1/2 x 11 format. Tim is also in the 
practice of putting on all-ages shows as is 
Ray Hessel. Drop him a line if interested at: 
P.O. Box 1 36, Corvallis, OR 97339. He can 
hook you up with the right people. Oh, I 
almost forgot, send him a couple bucks if 
you want him to send you the latest copy of 
Zine! 

Eugene still has stuff going on. 
The Monkeyhouse is still the best basement 
in the world. It’ s bigger than a lot of clubs out 
there, and prettier too. Contact Ben or Robbie 
at 85 E 19th, Eugene, OR 97401. There’s 
also Icky’s Teahouse, and just like last is- 
sue, I still don’t have their number (bad, 
BAD). I’m sure information does... 

So what about all the bands? Well 
I guess I’ll start out with the obituary part: 
Bicker, the gods of the Monkeyhouse have 
disbanded. Much to my dismay, I will no 
longer get to hear them play “Cuddle” live, 
but you can hear them play it on the Ex- 
cursion records comp., “Universal Choking 
Signal,” which will be out someday. They 



played their last show ever a couple months 
ago to a packed Monkeyhouse (they even 
played “Cuddle” to a huge sing-along!). It 
was truly the bestest show I ever saw them 
play, and as a very appropriate and well 
deserved sendoff, it made me even more sad 
to see ‘em go. Robbie and ben are now in a 
new unit called Quell, with Ben on drums 
and a new guy, Steiner, on bass. Having 
witnessed a brief Quell practice, they play 
more in the Fugazi/Bitch Magnet vein than 
Bicker ever did. John, the bass behind 
Bicker, has a new thing called Soda Jerk, 
judging by the demo he played us, it sounds 
like these guys will be a force to reckon with, 
playing along the Superchunk partyline. 
However, they didn’t have a singer at that 
point, hopefully they will soon! You can 
reach all of the above at the Monkeyhouse 
address. As a side note, I heard that Artless 
Motives may have broken up under the 
pretense that they’ll still play shows periodi- 
cally... but this is strictly a rumor which I can 
neither confirm or deny. I’ve also heard that 
their drummer is in a new crew called 
Paddington. Corvallis’ Lazyboy broke it off 
recently as well and I feel like a total dick 
because I never even heard them. I don’t 
even have the 7". Kill me. 







Portland is booming with bands, 
and I’ m so damn out of town now that it’ s not 
even funny. So my knowledge may be 
lacking. . . duh. Ten Four is a three-piece pop- 
core crew of the nicest kids around. They 
play unpretentious pop with a totally melodic 
punk flavor. They recently recorded ,at 
Portland’ s punk studio of choice, Killhaven 
Knights Productions, and plan to have a 
song on that Portland 7" comp, whenever it 
comes out. Another band who recorded at 
Killhaven is Punky Rockit, who you may 
remember from my last report. The presently 
have a 7" off at the pressing plant and hope 
to have it back before they go on a west coast 
tour with my band, Hutch (formerly Rake- 
more on that later), in early September.they 
also have one of the guitarists from my band 
now, too. Don’ t worry, we share him. Another 
short-lived band was Rusty Martin, which 
had ex-members of Hellbender and 
Billingsgate. Unfortunately, A1 had to go 
home as he was done with school for good. 
I guess Hellbender’s probably back to- 
gether now. Some other bands to mention: 
Turbine (Portland’s only hardcore band) 
featuring members of Hutch and ex-mem- 
bers of 4th Day Submerged, Plumber’s 
Butt (the band and the zine-but not the one 
from Michigan) sound like old Bad Reli- 



gion, Bangarang (Ex-members of Pivot and 
Tiger Trap), Hawthorne (Dan from Punky 
Rockit and his uncle) who play tuneful 
garage rock, and possibly a new band with 
Sean Croghan (of Crackerbash fame) also 
with Dan from Punky Rockit an ex-Ca- 
lamity Jane member, and the drummer from 
Rusty Martin. And, in the shameless self- 
promotion department: As I mentioned 
earlier, my band, Hutch, had to change our 
name (we used to be Rake) due to the fact 
that there were two other Rakes in exist- 
ence. We have one 7" called “Stupor” out on 
Hodge Podge/Dutch East under the name 
Rake and another one on the way on Ex- 
cursion/Dutch East. We play pop-punk 
stuff, like a lot of other bands these days. 
We’ll also be touring California with Punky 
Rockit all the way down to San Diego dur- 
ing the first two weeks of September 
(probably right as you read this). You can 
order our 7" for $3.00 PPD through Excur- 
sion mailorder at P.O. Box 20224, Seattle, 
WA 98102.By the way we also recorded our 
7" at Killhaven. If you’re looking for a de- 
cent 8-track studio with very reasonable 
rates and the one of the easiest engineers to 
work with, contact Tom at (503) 236-5220. 

Corvallis has Butch Lucky (Ex- 
members of Dumgut and Lazyboy), The 
Miscreants, Arcweld, Elmer (who’s ex- 
istence is presently questionable, and Raised 
By Yaks. But I won’t say too much, ‘cause 
Tim is supposed to do a Corvallis Scene 
report some day soon! Oh, and one more 
band from Eugene who I can’t ignore: 
Oswald Five-o. 

Record stores to go to: In Portland, 
see Second Avenue Records (Portland’s 
punk rock stand-by this place has been around 
forever and will always be the number one 
record shop in Portland), Ozone (The new 
kids, Ozone has made it’s self into a mecca 
for alternative lifestyle. Featuring piercing, 
vinyl (new and used) and a large selection of 
zine and hard-to-find underground memo- 
rabilia), and Roundhouse (I have yet to check 
it out, but I hear it’s got lots of classic punk 
stuff and hard to find punk rarities). In 
Corvallis go to Happy Trails, and Eugene 
go to Green Noise. 

If you’re in town and you need to 
know what to do or where to go, check out 
these free publications: Paperback Juke- 
box (covers the college rock scene and some 



punk stuff, decent show listings, though). 
PDXS (The more political brother to PBJ, 
also has listings). Snipehunt (seasonally 
published, general alternative zine, no list- 
ings usually). Schallplatten (Two issues 
printed up so far, soon to change to Power- 
house Monthly. Portland’s punk Zine cov- 
ering the goings on at the Powerhouse and 
abroad). 

In closing, I’d like to remind you 
all that I’m not omniscient, and I don’t get 
around a whole hell of a lot. So if you have 
a scene in Oregon, or a band, or a zine, 
DROP ME A LINE! Really... I wouldn’t 
have even thought about Corvallis had Tim 
from Zine not written me and told me what 
I was missing! I’m always glad to accept 
help and/or suggestions, so feel free! Re- 
member, I have a new address, so don’t use 
the one from issue #1. Until next time... 

-Bret Van Horn 
3095 SW 15th Ct 
Gresham, OR 97080 


same slate, different place 

CORVAIIIS 

I picked up a copy of Punk 
Planet #1 in Boise, ID and was 
pleased to see a scene report for 
Portland, OR (or “PDX” in 
hipsterspeak). This will examine 
other things that are going on in 
Oregon, south of the city. 

Hazel, a PDX band signed 
to Sub-Pop is the coolest pop- 
punk band in Oregon, closely 
followed by The Spinanes ( PDX ) 
and Oswald Five-O (Eugene). All 
of these bands are incredibly tight 
and cool and have albums out and 
you can’t go wrong with any of 
them, so there... 

Salem is the capitol of Or- 
egon, about 120,000 population. 
It is located about45 minutes south 
of Portland. Ttfc'y are running 
regular punk shows at a place 
called the Mission Mill and they 
have a good record store down- 
town, but I can’t tell you a thing 
beyond that. Someone else is 











gonna have to write in and let us all rock fanzines — Alter-Native , a punk masters Oswald Five-O hail 
know about that particular scene. It roughly bi-monthly 24 page program from Eugene City... HC band Pig- 
is not a town with a state university, guide put out by KBVR-FM, our let is on again, off again — currently 
Moving down the valley cool college radio station; Slavery on, I think. Joyless is a very good 
another 45 minutes, you get to $y$tem , a cut-and-paste DIY zine HC outfit with some sort of Piglet 
Corvallis, home of Oregon State put out by local show promoter Ray connection, I hear. I’ve seen ’em 
University. OSU is a cow college Hessel;andZ/ATs, produced by Kelly twice. Not my cuppa, but clearly a 
with about 15,000 students, not a E., T. Day, and yours truly. We good band. Bicker, an outstanding 
bad place to go to school if you can publish our thang bi-monthly, #6 will poppy band, has split due to creative 
deal with the slow pace of life. The be out by the time you read this ($2 differences. Word is that at least 
town is either outstanding or by mail). two new bands will form from the 

loathsome, depending on your Corvallis also has a cool fragments, so all is not lost. Details 

taste — about 45,000 population. record store, Happy Trails. TBA. The Minimals are from 

As ot this writing, there are Despite our relative lack of Cottage Grove, a lousy little town 

7 punk bands in Corvallis. Lazyboy venues and the Mayberry RFD pace south of Eugene, and are said to be 
has, sadly, broken up due to that of life, this is a cool and happening very good. They can only hit the 
age-old band killer, “personal dif- town in terms of music. Give it some road on Saturday nights, sadly. Thee 
ferences.” Two offshoot bands have though it you're packing up to go to Headhunters play a punky garage 
emerged from the ashes, fortu- college or just wanna get the hell out type stuff and have a good single 
nately — Butch Lucky, an out- of the city. We need a few more out on Tombstone Records. Artless 
standing poppy thing with three quality bands to move here perma- Motives are fast, funky, and fun. 
women up front and Lazyboy, Pete nently so that Larry Livermore is There was a split-7 u in the works 
Normal playing drums, and Pop forced to open up a northern division with Bicker, last I knew... Billy Jack 
Secret another poppy thing fea- of Lookout!. Bands passing through is an obnoxious homopunk band 
turing Lazyboy Derek Myers on Oregon probably need to give us at with a new single out. Lincoln 
bass. A couple of Butch Lucky least 6 weeks notice, unfortunately. Brigade is a polished modern rock 
members are talking about moving All-ages shows happen here about thing that got signed by Island from 
to Portland but keeping the band twice a month, on average, typically a demo tape, believe it or not. I 
together, while Derek is gonna on Friday nights. We’re in a position don't like them, either. There are 
move to Austin, TX, this summer, where we have to rent a hall and probably a couple more bands in 
which will crackle Pop Secret. The promote, our all-ages space crashed Eugene, I'm not sure, and I have no 
biggest buzz in town is for Butch about a year ago. Hard punk bands idea what the zine situation is in 
Lucky. should talk to Ray Hessel about what that fair metropolis. 

We still have local favorites he is doing — (503) 758-4308; pop- The best record store in 

The Miscreants, who rock hard punk bands would probably do best Eugene is Houseof Records, where 
and play a kind of mutant garage to talk to me at (503) 745-7862 or Robert from Oswald works. They 
surf music; Arcweld, headed up by drop me a line. also have a Happy Trails shop and 

Uncle Bert, a very loud band that Moving down the valley an- a cool campus radio station. A good 

uses lotsa fuzz and 666 imagery other 45 minutes, you get to Eugene, town to live, too. Check it out. 
galore; Elmer, yet another Lazyboy home of the University of Oregon. U I'm not sure if there is life in 

offshoot fronted by Sewer Troutist ofO is the liberal arts school, whereas Oregon south of Eugene, but I can 
Jim McLean featuring fast twangy OSU is historically the cow college, say one thing — ’’MOVE WEST, 
con-tree sounds and naughty lyrics; Eugene is bigger, about 120,000 KIDDIES!!!” 

Raised by Yaks, basically a jazz- people, methinks, and has a cool all- 
punk band that actually reads' mu- ages space called Icky’s Teahouse. T. Chandler doZINEV.O. Box 136 
sic on stage (I saw ’em!); and Half Bands moving through the state Corvallis, OR 97339 
Rack, a boy/girl pop-punk thing should investigate that space, al- 
fronted by a woman named Camille though the money will be very 
and guitar man Grant, ex-of leg- minimal: (503) 686-5044. There is 
endary local fuzzmasters, Lupo. also a punk rock-oriented bar (run by 
Lazyboy, Elmer, Miscre- Bruce of the HC band The Detona- 
ants, Lupo, and Arcweld all have tors) called John Henry’s Tavern. 

7" singles out on various labels. Bookings there are handled by Lucy 
Write me for more details. at (503) 344-2475. 

Corvallis also has 3 punk As I mentioned above, pop- 








new york 


O.K., this is only the second scene report 
I’ve written/been involved with (the first 
was printed in MRR and circulated through- 
out the Internet), so I’ll play it simple. I’ll go 
category by category, with little — if any — 
style and just pack it chock full ‘oinfo! You 
ready? Here we go ( ...Whoa! Hold on a sec. 
One thing I want to make clear: this report 
totally ignores the very happening punk, 
hardcore and Oi ! scenes in neighboring New 
Jersey. Although many people lump NY and 
NJ together; I won’t. That’s a whole other 
scene report)... 

Clubs/Shows: NYC still sorta sucks for un- 
signed bands, especially unsigned punk/HC 
bands. ABC No Rio (156 Rivington St.) is 
still happening with 
touring and local bands 
playing for low door 
prices (usually $3-$5). 

Recent bands who came 
through town and played 
included Bikini Kill, 

Youth Brigade, Citizen 
Fish, Spitboy, etc. Lo- 
cally, bands like Public 
Nuisance, Disassociate, 

13 and Huasipungo 
play there often. The 
ABC record store is also 
still happening with a 
great selection of 
records, ‘zines, and CDs 
with low, fair prices. The 
club was recently issued 
an eviction notice by the 
city and have started a 


petition to stay alive. There was also a march/ 
art protest held to show support for the only 
true punk, all-ages club NYC’s got. 

All-ages, hardcore/punk matinees are still 
happening in NYC at: Wetlands (161 
Hudson St., 212-966-4225), essentially a 
patchouli-friendly, eco-conscious club dur- 
ing the week (‘ya know, Dead cover bands, 
bad b.o., etc.) with matinees on Sundays 
featuring everything from straight-edge 
hardcore to death and grind; The Gas Sta- 
tion (E. Second Street & Avenue B); ABC 
No Rio; the Bond St. Cafe (Bond St. off 
B ’ way) and every once and a while at CBGBs 
(315 Bowery, 212-982-4052) In general, 
shows have gone pretty smoothly with little 
violence and pretty large turn-outs. For a 
while there were a lot of HC/punk matinees 
happening on Long Island, but due to crowd 
violence, they’re practically no more except 
at newer clubs like The U.N. (62 Newark CT. , 
Hempstead, Long Island) and P.W.A.C. 
(1170 Route 109, Lindenhurst), but I’m no 
authority on the Island so I’ll shut up... 

Other clubs in the NYC-area include The 
Continental (25 Third Ave. , 2 1 2-529-6924) 
who have been doing their “P.M.S.” (Punk, 
Metal Sundays) shows, featuring all female 
or female-fronted groups-only and shows 
during the week ranging from bad hair-core/ 
funk-metal to great local legends like the 
Devil Dogs, Sea Monster and Simon And 
The Barsinisters. The Grand (ex-Cat 


Club) — which was a larger venue, with 
mostly bigger, touring bands playing and the 
occasional local band — is now shut-down. 
Brownies (169 Avenue A, 212-420-8392) 
has great sound, a friendly staff, generally 
low door prices, and good beer, but it’s hit- 
or-miss musically, although lately some cool 
touring bands have played there (New Bomb 
Turks, Raw Power, Supersuckers) and 
they’re starting to book the better of the local 
bands. The Mercury Lounge (217 E. 
Houston St., 212-260-4700) is a newer club 
who seems to be booking some decent stuff, 
but I’ ve yet to go there so I can’ t give you any 
real info. The Spiral (244 E. Houston, 212- 
353-1740) is a nicely layed-out club with 
rarely a good band playing. The Cooler 
(416 W. 14th St., 212-229-0785) is a pretty 
cool new club, with good sound, neat layout 
and decent bands, although it’s totally out 
and in the middle of the fithy, WestSide 
meat-packing district. The Pyramid (101 
Avenue A, 212-490-2162) is sort of a dump 
with the occasional punk/hardcore show and 
tons of queer-friendly nights. The Bank 
(225 E. Houston St., 212-505-5033) rarely 
has live bands anymore, although they have 
played host to most of the area Oi ! shows 
(including United Front’s Oi! The Gather- 
ing Festival, Red Alert and The Business) 
and on Friday nights are a gothic/industrial 
dance club. The Knitting Factory (47 E. 
Houston St, 2 1 2-2 1 9-3055) is N Y’ s home to 
avant garde and free jazz as well as some 
experimental music shows and punk-related 
shows (they re- 
cently featured a 
night of Skin Graft 
bands). Don Hill’s 
(511 Greenwich 
St., 2 12-334- 1390) 
is a newer club that 
has an excellent 
Friday event called 
Squeezebox which 
features local 
queer-friendly 
bands 
(Lunachicks, NY 
Loose), go-go boys 
and girls, videos, 
drag stars as well 
as an excellent d.j. 
who spins a great 
combo of classic 







punk, metal, glam and hardcore. Under 
Acme (Great Jones St.) is a great spot that 
the bands essentially rent themselves for 
$ 1 50, set the door price and book the bands. 
Obviously it’s total hit or miss musically. 
The worst clubs, the ones that must be avoided 
at all costs are: The Lion’s Den (great lay- 
out, the worst bands imaginable, total frat/ 
jock crowd), New Music Cafe (shitty sound, 
bad layout, bone-head bouncers, shitty bands) 
and A.K.A. A good way to find out about 
local punk, HC and “alternative” shows is to 
call the Opec-Sid line @ 212-ope-csid. It’s 
a free local call and they update the message 
every Thursday morning. The weekly news- 
paper NY Press also does a great job at show 
listings and is available free throughout the 
city. I try to post cool, punk/HC-related 
shows on the Internet (alt. punk, 
alt. music. independent, alt.music. hardcore, 
etc,) whenever I can so check there too. 

Punk-ish Happenings: Recently there have 
been some real punk extravaganzas in town: 
Sound Views ‘zine threw a huge anniversary 
bash at Brownies with Deadguy, The 
Chimpanzees, Hell No, Sweet Diesel and 
Iron Prostate; the Grand before it closed, 
played host to Skampilation ’94, a two day 
festival featuring a ton of Oi! and ska bands 
(including The Templers, The Wretched 
Ones, Mephiskapeles, Oxblood, Slackers, 
Agent 99, etc.); United Front successfully 
brought England’s The Business to NYC 
(and the U.S.) for the first time ever; this 
Summer, the Gas Station played host to the 
1994 Hardcore/Skacore Festival as well as 
two huge matinee shows with bands as di- 
verse as Dropdead, Bad Trip, Dismay, 
Final Warning and Kisses N’ Hugs play- 
ing; on Long Island, Reservoir Records 
threw a “Fuck Lollapalooza” show featuring 
eight bands (Garden Variety, Doc Hop- 
per, Farkus Affair, Rye, etc.) and in 
Brooklyn there have been a couple of shows 
at an illegal club called The Front, the last 
one featuring a bunch of great local HC/ 
noise/grind/punk bands. Hopefully there will 
be more gigs there soon as it went really 
well, with a large, turn-out, and no problems 
(although the sound was less-than great). 

Bands/Labels: There are so many, I’m sure 
I’ll miss tons and pfss people off. Oh well, 
here goes: Long Island’s Mind Over Mat- 


ter just finished touring Europe, and their 
debut LP Security (Wreck- Age Records, 45 1 
W. Broadway, #2N, NYC 10012) is out 
now. Wreck-Age also recently released a 
mini-LP from Die 1 16 (featuring ex-mem- 
bers of Burn, Rorschach and Opposition), a 
new S.F.A. 7-inch, and the debut mini-LP 
from GinMill (which features a couple of 
guys from Crawlpappy). Hate-core band, 
Neglect have left Wreck-Age to sign with 
Chicago’s We Bite (POB 10172, Chicago, 
IL 606 1 0) who just released a CD EP for the 
band. Speaking of hate, Sheer Terror have 
a brand-new CD EP/ 10-inch out on Black- 
out! Records (P.O.B. 544, Yonkers, NY 
1 0710). Big Sniff is a band causing quite the 
buzz around here. They feature ex-members 
of Sheer Terror and Ludichrist, yet sound 
like neither. They opt for a more pop-HC 
sound. They have a German LP, a 7-inch on 
MintTone (84-29 153rd Ave., #LCD, 
Howard Beach, NY 11414), and an upcom- 
ing full-length on Grass Records/Dutch East 
India. Hell No have been playing out more 
often and have a new 7” coming out soon on 
Germany’s X-Mist. Madball (whose last 7- 
inch was also on Wreck-Age), have a new 
full-length out called Set It Off on Road- 
runner Records. The band is essentially 
Agnostic Front with Rodger’s brother 
Freddie on vox. Orange 9mm (featuring 
Chaka from Burn and Chris from 
FountainHead), have an EP out on Revela- 
tion and a full-length coming out this fall on 


EastWest/Atlantic Records. Also now on 
EastWest are Sick Of It All, whose major- 
label debut should be out by late September. 
Warzone have a new CD on Victory Records 
(POB 146546, Chicago, IL 60614) which 
features live tracks and newly recorded 
covers of old NY-punk songs by bands like 
The Abused, Youth Of Today, Damage, etc. 
Profile Records will also be re-issuing the 
bands first two LPs on one CD this Sep- 
tember. Profile also recently re-issued 
Murphy’s Law’s first two LPs on one CD 
as well as the first two Cro-Mags LPs and a 
NY Hardcore compilation entitled Sunday 
Matinee , which was compiled by Jimmy of 
Murphy’s Law and features bands like 
Reagan Youth, Bold, Youth Of Today, Bad 
Brains, etc. All female doom-core band 13 
have been playing around quite a bit and are 
featured on Pessimiser Fanzine's new 
double 7-inch compilation with Eyehategod, 
Crisis, Spazz, Disassociate and others. They 
also have. their own 7-inch and a split 7-inch 
with Grief ( 1 3 c/o Alicia, 227 Sterling Place. , 
#1D, Brooklyn, NY 11238). Speaking of 
Disassociate (featuring Ralphy of Jesus 
Chrust and ex-members of Missing Foun- 
dation and Black Rain), the band just released 
their debut 7-inch. Seven songs of ugly, 
brutal grinding punk (Splifford Prod., 32 E. 
7th St., #1A, NYC 10009). Another ex- 
member band is industrial-punkers Thorn, 
which features guys from Nausea and Win- 
ter. They recently inked a deal with Road- 






runner Records, so watch for their debut 
full-length soon. Sweet Diesel is a newer 
band with quite a “buzz.” They have a really 
original, raw, fast hard sound, not unlike the 
Rolling Stones meets SSDecotrol. They have 
7-inch out on Boston’ s Shifty Records. They 
hope to have a full-length out some time this 
winter (S.D. c/o Ben Smith, 5 Cranford St., 
Queens, NY 1 1375). Youth Gone Mad are 
still together after something like ten years 
and a gazillion members. They have a new 
CD called Day Job out on their own Moving 
Target Records (180 Varick St., 14th Fir., 
NYC 10014). Also on Moving Target is the 
debut full-length from surfy-pop-punk band, 
the Gloo Girls who also run their own all- 
female, punk moving company called 
Amazon Movers. Garden Variety’s debut 
self-titled LP on Gern Blandsten has done 
super well, as did their cross-country tour 
this past Spring. They should have a split 7- 
inch with Hell No out soon on Reservoir 
Records and another split with Dahlia Seed 
out on MintTone Records (G. V. c/o Anthony, 
44 Ormonde Blvd., Valley Stream, NY 
.1 1580). 25 Ta Life, who sound like vintage 
Agnostic Front meets ’90s moshcore just 
released their first 7-inch on Striving For 
Togetherness Records (P.O.B. 564571, 
College Pt., NY 11356-4571). The Chim- 
panzees have been making tons of noise 
with their pretty much all Japanese line-up 
and chimpanzees costumes. They have a 
full-length out on their own Stingy Banana 
Records called El Chimpo Grande (29 Perry 
St., #1F, NYC 10014). Krishna-core band 
108, which features ex-members of Crown 
Of Thorns, Shelter, Resurrection, etc., just 
released their excellent second CD, Songs Of 
Separation , on Equal Vision Records (111 
W. 24th St., 6th fir, NYC 10011-1912). 
Equal Vision will also be releasing the debut 
CD from young NY hardcore band, Shift. 
NY’s most violent band, the noise/grind/ 
hardcore-punk monstrosity known as 
Altercate The Senses, just finished re- 
cording a new full-length cassette called 
Fuck Everyone and have been destroying 
any club that hasn’t banned them yet. Kill- 
ing Time (a.k.a Raw Deal) are back together 
and rumor has it they will release a new full- 
length sometime soon on Blackout! Records. 
Also back together (at least for one show in 
Jersey) is Bold. Supposedly Gorilla Bis- 
cuits will be doing a one-off reunion tour 


(although this is totally a rumor). Medicine 
Man have broken up. Other NY-based bands 
of note include: The Denied, Unsane, 
Crown Of Thorns, New Republic, The 
Goops, Bugout Society, The Wives, Young 
Master Killers, Distraught, Die Monster 
Die, The Astro Zombies, Hot Corn Girls, 
Tape Worm, Bad Trip, Crisis, Sub Zero, 
WigHat, Road Vultures, Lone Wolves, 
Surgery, Rejuvenate, Timmy, Yuppicide, 
Merauder, Intrinsic Action, Iron Pros- 
tate, Pillbox NYC, Ff, Thrust, Dead 
Relatives, Public Nuisance, etc. There’s a 
lot more, but little space. 

Record Stores: There are really no purely 
punk record stores, except ABC No Rio’s 
which is out-of-the-way and in a pretty bad 
neighborhood. Kim’s Underground (1 44 E. 
Bleeker St.) has a good 7-inch selection 
(probably the best in NYC), a good amount 
of industrial and noise imports and decent 
prices. Too much alterna-puke, though. 
Venus Records on St. Marks Place is pretty 
cool, they usually have some decent used 
punk/HC records and carry tons of rock CDs 
from the ’60s/’ 70s. Holy Cow in Brooklyn 
is where you’ll get the most for your trade- 
ins (9th St. @ 7th Ave.). For CD, 7-inch and 
video bootlegs, plus a good selection of 
hardcore and punk, check out Generation 
Records (Thompson St.). They also have a 
great selection of imports, including tons of 
Oi! and ska stuff. At the time of this writing 
I heard that Neil of Tribal War and ABC No 
Rio had opened a store somewhere in 
Brooklyn, but unfortunately I couldn’t get 
any info. Check the ads in upcoming issues 
of MRR (and hopefully Punk Planet). I also 
heard that the guys/gals from Equal Vision 
Records were opening a store, write them c/ 
o the above label address for more info. 
Other stores include: Tower, Sam Goody, 
J&R, Second Comings, HMV, Downtown 
Music Gallery, Zapp, Sam Goody and 
Revolver. 

'Zines: I publish Sound Views, a bi- 
monthly newsprint ‘zine that features all 
kinds of local bands, including punk/HC 
bands, audio and live reviews, columns, 
comics and more. We are not purely punk / 
HC, but if you’re open-minded and want to 
know what’s really going down in NYC, 
you’ll dig it. You can pick it up free all over 


NYC or get it mailorder for $2ppd cash (96 
Henry St. , #5 W, Brooklyn, NY 1 1 20 1 - 1 7 1 3). 
Also free in NY is the excellent Under The 
Volcano, which covers more of the Long 
Island punk/hardcore scene and some bigger 
national punk and industrial bands. They 
also feature a great punk-interest column by 
M RR- regular, Donny The Punk and the 
Paranoid and Roach Clip mini-’zines 
($2ppd from P.O.B. 236, Nesconset, NY 
11767). NY Press is free everywhere and 
has great local club listings and on the rare 
occasion features a local band that’s not on 
a major label. Bill Bugout Society puts out 
the hilarious, ultra-obnoxious Greedy Bas- 
tard ($lppd from POB 1014, Yonkers, NY 
10704-1014); the new issue features Punk 
Rock Jews, an “interview” with Earth Crisis 
and much more. Jersey Beat (418 Gregory 
Ave., Weehawken, NJ 07087) is one of the 
longest running local ‘zines. They are defi- 
nitely punk, but open-minded to much, much 
more and always feature tons of profiles, 
record reviews and more. Their last issue is 
a must-have with its focus being “the selling 
of punk-rock.” The See Hear Bookstore 
(59 E. 7th St., NYC 10003) is our local ‘zine 
shop. They’ve got everything from punk to 
industrial to sex to trash-culture ‘zines, plus 
all the local freebies on display. They’ve 
also got a great mailorder catalog for $2ppd. 

Bad Newz Dept.: Chuck Valle, long-time 
Murphy’s Law bassist, was recently mur- 
dered while working in California. He was a 
major part of the NY scene and was currently 
playing with the band Dripping Goss as well 
as doing live sound at area clubs like the 
Grand. He will be sorely missed and this 
scene report is respectfully dedicated to his 
memory. 

Okay, I think I’ve pretty much covered ev- 
erything. If you got left out, sorry, there’s 
only so much room and this thing is already 
huge. You can write me c/o Sound Views 
(96 Henry St., #5W, Brooklyn, NY 11201- 
1713) or send me email 
(lee96@mindvox.phantom.com <or> 
SoundViews@aol.com). Peace... 

— Lee Greenfeld 
[c]1994 Sound Views/Lee Greenfeld, All 
Rights Reserved 
All photos by Justine De Metrickl Intermission 
Photo 'Zine, 907 Willow Avenue, #Z, 
Hoboken, NJ 07030 






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TALKIN' NONSENSE WITH 

JAWBRE 


On July 23rd at the San Diego World 
Beat Center I had the opportunity to 
see one of my favorite bands, Jaw- 
breaker. Before the show Adam Pfahler 
their drummer and Chris Bauermeister 
their bass player generously donated 
their time to speak with us in Duck’s 
van in the parking lot. They were not 
only friendly and interesting, but 
showed us their humorous sides as well 
as letting us hear their personal phi- 
losophies and advice. If you like this 
interview, please send stamps for our 
zine “It’s All Good’’ at P. O. Box 8535 
Rancho Santa 
Fe, CA 92067 
because it 
relates to 
many of 
the topics 
that came 



up in this interview. 

Interview by Jason “Duck” Grossberg 
and David Selevan with a lot of help 
from John Zero and Tony. 

PP:If you could pilot a UFO for a day, 
who would you abduct and why? 

Adam: I think I would have to go back to 
E.T. and get Drew Benymore. 

Chris: Yeah, stealing Drew would be great. 
Adam: Chris has an obsession with Drew 
Berrymore and so does his 
girlfriend. The thing is, we play this game 
called what would you rather. 

Let me ask you a question. What would 
you rather do, slide down that telephone 
pole, or would you rather tongue kiss 
Walter Kronkite for an hour with your 
eyes open? 

PP:You know, I’m a little bit adventur- 
ous. I think I’d go for the Walter 
Kronkite one, just to say I did it. 

Chris:That question was like 
comparing apples and or- 
anges, you have to 
choose two pain ones 
like.... 

Adam: Going down 
the pole in 117 
degree whether 
or go 75 miles 
per hour down 
the freeway 
and opening 
the door and 
dangling your 
foot out the 
door without 
a shoe on the 
ground for 
twenty sec- 


onds until it gets right down to the bone 
and knuckles of your toes and then you 
have to squeeze lemon juice on it. 

PP:I have tweezers, so I think I’d rather 
go for the telephone pole. 

Chris:No,no wait. There is a condition 
on the telephone pole wasn’t there? Oh 
yeah, you have to use boxing gloves if you 
want to get the splinters out. 

Adam: And then you fall into a rose bush 
at the bottom of course. 

PP:I*d go for the boxing gloves rose 
bush extravaganza. So, you have done 
split records with both Jawbox and 
Sami am, how do you feel about them 
signing to major record labels? 

Adam: We are PROUD of them. 
Chris:Yeah. They are friends of ours. 
Adam: We have no problem with that, 
Obviously, we know a lot of people that 
signed. Just because we are not on a 
major label doesn’t mean that we’ll come 
down on people who are. We are very 
tolerant people. 

PP:Will you ever consider signing to a 
major label? 

Chris:Maybe, who knows? 

Adam:People aways ask if you would ever 
sign to a major label, but what can we 
say but that one must consider every- 
thing, you can’t cut off options for your- 
self. 

Chris: I’m almost 28 in a month and it’s 
like well I could make more money or I 
could get a decent day job. What would 
you choose given the option? 

PP:I wouldn’t sell MYself out to rock 
and roll. 

Adam: We won’t begrudge our friends for 
doing som thing we didn’t do. That’s silly. 

PP:The only people who will say you 
sold out are the 17 year old kids. 

Chris: Who live with their parents anyway. 
Last night when Jawbox played people 
yelled ‘get off the stage and let a real punk 
band play.’ It turns out they were jazz 
musician college students who started 
listening to it like this year and decided 
to prove how hard they were and they 
had like long hair and rave t-shirts on. 
PP:Like that one guy who likes NOFX 
and decides he is tough... 









ews 



Chris:Exactly. 

PP:What do you look for in a breakfast 
cereal? 

Chris: I like sugar as the first ingrdient. 
And texture is good. I recently got a 
pound and a half of Kellog’s Corn Flakes 
for 69 cents because we had awesome 
coupons. 

Adam:I don’t eat sugar cereal. I have 
granola that goes good in cereal or in yo- 
gurt and like all kinds of meals can be 
made from it. 

Chris: It must have a man with a blue 
hat and a mostache and red berries. I 
look for the Cap’n basicly. 

PP:In recent news Cap'n Crunch was 
promoted to general. 

Chris:I think it would be Admiral Crunch. 
Adam: He is in the Navy and all. 

PP: After touring with Nirvana, how 
were you affected by Kurt Cobain’s 
death? 

Chris: It is just really sad. He was a re- 
ally cool guy. It sucks for anyone to kill 
themself. 

Adam:That totally affected us. We were 
on tour and our band had broken up and 
then we got bad news. That’s just the 
worst thing that you can hear. We were 
as bummed out as anybody. 

PP:Wallet chains, fashion or function? 
Chris: Fashion. You can get a wallet that 
is small enough that you don’t have to 
chain it to your body. Point and case, I 
don’t own a chained wallet and Adam 
doesn’t own a chained wallet. 

Adam: When we did our tour I had one 
because I had to have one. It was loaded 
up with dough. That was function. 

PP:I have a self help question. I’m in a 
band called Chump and was wonder- 
ing if you had any advice for young 
bands? 

Adam:Tour. We put out a 7" on a compi- 
lation. 

Chris: We did stuff like “limited edition of 
500” because we couldn’t afford anymore 
than 500. On marble vinyl so maybe 
people would buy it for the vinyl if they 
didnt like the music. 

PP:I get excited if I find somthing on 
black vinyl. 

Chris: We released our first 7", and it de- 
pends on who hears it. It’s so much luck 
more than skill. Stay around awhile. The 
longer you stay around, the more people 
that have heard of you. 

Adam:Too many bands break up fast. 
You should play with bands that you gen- 
erally get along with. It’s cool and conve- 


nient that way. We never thought that 
we would play in Europe or anything. 
Chris: We played to your relatives our first 
show. 

Adam: Yeah, it was like my brother. 

PP:How do you feel about old song re- 
quests? 

Adam: It’s harsh because there’s a lot 
we don’t know how or don’t want to play 
anymore because it’s been so long. We 
didn’t even play Busy when we toured in 
1990 because it was so old then. The 
only thing that keeps you inspired and 
wanting to play is playing the new 
stuff. It’s just that people don’t know 
the words and can’t sing along, we 
feel like we have to win people 
over. We tiy to play about half 
new stuff. When I go to see a 
band play I usually wan’t to hear 
all their songs I know but if they 
played an entirely new set I 
would listen harder, it just 
wouldn’t be as cathardic. 

Chris:A lot of that 7" stuff is old 
as shit. 

PP:I was told to ask you about 
sharp objects. 

Chris: Well the latest thing is I’m not 
allowed to use glass. Dishware most of 
the time. Because I destroy them on a 
regular basis. I have bad luck with 
glasses. I recently destroyed plastic cups. 
Enen plastic cups aren’t safe. 

Adam:He’s talking about your collection. 
Chris: Oh knives?Swords? I’ve got lots of 
knives. 

PP:So you are the kind of guy who goes 
to the Cutting Edge at the mall and 
yells GIVE ME A KNIFE!’? 

Chris:No, actually I collect mainly 
late 19th century German bayonetts and 
swords. 

PP:So you’re a sick, sick man, that’s 
what you’re telling us. 

Chris: Yes, I’ve got the spikey helmets, I’ve 
got the iron crosses. I’ve been collecting 
since I was 13 and my dad bought me a 
Civil War cavalry sword. Military antiques 
and history are my habit , I have hun- 
dreds of history reference books on mili- 
tary history and stuff, but my girlfriend 
likes me so that’s OK. The uninformed 
think I’m a Nazi. I’m talking pre 1918. I 
used to collect some of the Nazi stuff but 
the political implications were a little too 
deep, so I stopped because I got tired of 
saying ‘NO, I’m not a Nazi, I just collect 
the shit.” I have a strange sort of tie with 
the whole history of Germany because my 




Dad’s a 
German immigrant 
and grew up in Nazi 
Germany and I was 
born in Berlin. I’m a 
Germanophile. I’m sorry. 

I’ll admit it freely. 

PP: What’s you favorite Kiss song? 

Adam: I don’t own any Kiss records. 
Chris :Yeah, we were never down with 
Kiss. I think Blake put it best when he 
said Kiss covers were somthing Red Cross 
should do. 

Adam:They’re in the national 
subconcious. 

Chris:Cheap Trick however, if you ask me 
about Cheap Trick. 

PP:I’d reather not. A personal favor- 
ite I have is Fast Cars, Chicks, and the 
Crew by Motley Crew. 

Adam: I had the first Motley Crew record 
and I was deep into punk at the time, 
like hardcore punk but I thought it was 
hot. 

PP:What was the first show that you 
went to? 

Chris: 7 Seconds in Connecticut. 




(gnu 



Adam: I saw Black Flag, the decendents, 
and the Minute Men and Black Flag was 
playing as a 5 peice and that was pretty 
rad .That was as the Ukranian Culture 
Center in L.A. We used to see Black Flag 
play all the time. That was weird seeing 
them play as a 5 peice. I was scared 
shitless, I didn’t know what was going on. 

I was like ‘Oh my God The Minute Men 
and the Decendents, what the 
fuck?’ 

PP:What is the story of 
how you broke up? 

Chris:We toured for three 
months and had never 
toured before. 

Adam:Don’t tour for 
that long. 

Chris :The personality 
differences were wayto 
great. Try to keep 
shows booked frequently. 

You need money in your pocket 
and gas in the tank. 

PP:I’ve been noticing a lot in 
the papers and tabloids about 
government files circulating 
about aliens controlling ev- 
erything. How do you feel 
about this, where do you 
stand, and what are your be- 
liefs on the topic? 

Chris: Alien invasion has been 
coming up a lot lately. 

Adam:I was reading a thing on are 
51 and it’s pretty clear by the se- 
crecy that somthings going on, either 
they are testing somthing or they found 
somthing. Who knows. It’s not going to 
be like Close Encounters. We will never 
know. It boggles the mind. The implica- 
tions of another group of things from 
somwhere else destroys the foundation 
of most religions. 

Chris :The increased sightings of UFO’s 

is a generalization of wishful thinking on 

the behaf of most people who want to 
think there’s some place else, there’s 
other people with civilizations, and they 
will come and save us or we will band 
against them and it replaces some places 
religion filled and helps people get over 
the fact that things suck so bad. 

Ad am: We hear about things in ancient 
civilizations in their art and we look at it 
now and we say it looks like a UFO but in 
the big blow up in post World War 2 or 
the Mcarthy era or the communist scare 
and in films there was an onslought of 
science fiction and people everywhere 


were seeing UFO’s. I just saw a Discovery 
show and it was a documentery about 
people who claimed that they had been 
abductees and one of the main ponts was 
how close to Christianity their worship 
was and their faith in it and how it sub- 
stituted it and they drove from each other, 
they would say who knows maybe Christ 
was an alien or how did they come up 
with such agriculture forms before we did 
but it’s pretty interesting, the tape I 
saw because it was pretty harsh and 
manipulative because it showed 



the 

people as 
kooks and that they 
were goofy and had wild 
ideas but it was kind of 
cool. 

PPiAny bizarre dreams that 
you would like to share? 

Chris: I had a dream that we were tour- 
ing the antarctic and there were a bunch 
of sub-continents down there that don’t 
really exist and we had to drive the van 
across the ice caps in order to get from 
show to show and we were really con- 
cerned because we didn’t have any snow 
tires. 

Adam: I used to have a lot of dreams where 
I got shot by police. I don’t know why, 
I’ve never been arrested, the cops were 


just blowing me away all the time. I had 
one really shitty dream that I lost all of 
my feeling and sensory perception and I 
was just sort of a brain thinking and it 
was total blackness and it was fading out 
and it was such a drag waking up, I just 
asked, is that it? 

Chris:When you have a dream about guns 
do they work? Like instead of going 
bang!bang!Your dead, they go 
click!click!click! 

PP:In my dreams I can’t even aim the 
gun. I’ve noticed around here that the 
police have been harassing us a lot 
lately for such things as conspiricy to 
J-walk and curfew at 10:00. Do you 
see this also? 

Chris: It varies from city to city. 

Adam: Last tour I was stopped for 
speeding and they saw the junk in 
the van and they thought for sure 
we were dope dealers. They called 
in a DEA officer who had a dog 
and they said you can either 
volentarily have our can 
searched or we could just take 
you down town so of course 
they searched the van with an 
hour to spare to a show so the 
drug guy had a little kit with 
him and he found crystal 
deoderant stuff because our 
rhodie had it and they thought 
it was pure cocaine and so he did 
a little lab test on our front seat 
with a little vial and it changed col- 
ors so an hour later we got sent home. 
Chris :They said ‘these are nice boys. 
They don’t got nothin.’ 

Adam: We were in Georgia. 
PP:Out here some people are 
starting a music coalition 
with some local bands play- 
ing so there was always a 
show and there would be one 
main band to draw a crowd. 
Would Jawbreaker ever be in- 
terested in playing a show like 
this? 

Chris: Yeah, we’ll play anywhere. We 
played at a wedding reception recently. 
It’s a question of how far the drive is and 
if we could get other shows at the same 
time. 

Adam: We would have to make it so we 
could make it home and not lose all our 
money. We plan months in advance now. 
We know where we will be in August and 
September and in October we will be in 
Europe for six weeks. We get calls from 






4 


erviews 




people who want 
songs for comps, 
people who are our 
friends and we’re 
booked up and it’s 
like we have nothing 
to give. 

PP:We like the fact that 
you do comps, because they 
are usually cheap and have 
great bands. Will you ever re- 
release any of the out of print stuff? 
Adam: Usually the things we would want 
to put out and keep in print we have. Like 
‘Kiss The Bottle’ being on Music For The 
Proletariat we know that he is going to 
keep that in print as long as he can but 
some of the other $tuff we don’t want to 
play anymore so why re-record and re- 
releaseunless we were going to do a whole 
record of that stuff and somtimes it’s kind 
of a rip-off when you get an album of a 
band and it’s all their old demos and stuff. 
Tape them from people you know but 
certainly don’t pay twenty bucks for a 7" 
because there is somone out there who 
has them. 

Chris . Write Blacklist Mailorder. They 
have that shit for cheap. 

PP:How do you feel about $8 ticket 
prices? 

Adam: When I book tours I try to keep the 
door down so it’s always all-ages and al- 
ways $5. This one I didn’t book at all, 
and we agreed because it is a co-headlin- 
ing show and we figure a shitload of 
people would go see Jawbox and maybe 
a few people would come see us and a 
higher price wasn’t like pulling teeth. We 
just came off a $5 tour and here we have 
two DC bands and a local band and us, 
so I don’t feel bad about the price. If 
somone doesn’t want to pay $8 I under- 
stand, but it’s a good show. 

PP:What was it like when Blake had 
throat surgery? 

Adam:We were on tour and he spit 
som thing and it was just beat red like 
somthing that came from hell and we 
were like ‘man you really ought to go see 
a doctor’and he had his throat checked 
before on the way to Europe somwhere 
in like Detroit or somthing and they gave 
him hormones and whatever but it obvi- 
ously didn’t work so we had to fly from 
Dublin to England to get surgery and they 
hooked him up because the person that 
booked n ur tour had a bunch of nurses 
livivng in the house so he got surgery but 
I split at that point and went to meet my 



friend Lydia(sp?) and we went to Paris 
for like five days because there were so 
many people staying in the house while 
he was recovering and we had to give 
them peace so we didn’t get to play En- 
gland at all and it was scary and we’d 
call every day and ask how he was doing 
and he wasn’t talking and when he fi- 
nally did speak he sounded like a com- 
pletely different person like how I remem- 
bered him in high school and it was bi- 
zarre. His voice was fucked up and it 
turned out to be a benine tumor on his 
vocal chord and that’s pretty serios so we 
were scared shitless for him. It wasn’t 
like oh bummer our tours gonna get can- 
celled it was like holy shit is he ever goning 
to be allright. 

PP:Was it from smoking? 

Adam:No, he was just prone to it but 
smoking might have helped it. He quits 
all the time. 

PP:What kind of people do you guys 
meet? 

Adam: Chris has a lot of people relate to 
him , sort of his own following. He meets 
up with some really bizarre people who 
love him because he is nuts and he is 
smart.He majored in philosophy and lit- 
erature. 

PP:Are there any new releases that you 
would like to talk about? 

Chris: Did you get the new Smitten 
comp.? On Karate in LA? 

There’s a song on is that 
Adam doesn’t like any 
more but we like. Do 
you have the 
Lookout! comp.? 

Adam:We also 
just recorded 
one song in LA 
that we will 
play tonight. It 
is for a 7"with 
four bands. 

PP:We would 
like to thank 
J a w - 


breaker for doing this interview. They 
can be reached at Jawbreaker P.O.Box 
411324, San Francisco CA,94141. 






* 




Chances are that if you’ve 
heard anything about the 
Defiance/Inhumane tour 
this summer it’s been stuff 
that makes them look like 
complete drunken 

assholes. Although I un- 
derstand that was an appli- 
cable description on a few 
occasions (South Carolina), 
it is overall not true. When 
they came through our 
parts for a show I set up for 
them they couldn’t have 
been cooler. They were 
drunk, but definitely not 
assholes. So after those few 
words trying to clear up 
their reputation a bit here’s 
Jon Entropy, Matt Berland, 
and my interview with De- 
fiance. -Will Dandy 
P.P.: So, what are your names and what in- 
struments do you play? 

Kelly: I’m Kelly and I play bass. 

Mike: I’m Mike and I play guitar. 

Kelly: Gibby sings, Tony sings and Eric plays 
drums 

P.P.: How did the band get started? 

Kelly: We’ve all kinda been playing in bands 
for a few years now and all of our former bands 
broke up and we decided to form a new one 
and there was nothing happening in Portland, 
Deprived had been broken up for a few years 
and Resist had broken up and Unamused had 
broken up and Portland needed something 
more than was existing at that point. 

P.P.: So do you think of the band as like 
more of a political statement, or is it just 
having fun, or a bit of both? 

Kelly: I like to say there’s a combination of 
both. It’s hard to be really political and dog- 
matic after a point, I try to live whatever po- 
litical expression I express as much as I can 
in my life, but there’s a point where it be- 
comes really impractical to actually go out and 
destroy buildings and smash governments 
and stuff. That’s why I kinda distance myself 
from the lyrical content of the band just be- 
cause 1 think most people don’t really back- 


up what they have to say and I don’t wanna 
be a hypocrite, so I’m not really going to say a 
whole lot about toppling the government or 
whatever. 

P.P.: What are your political beliefs then? 
Kelly: A bit too complicated to sum up in one 
phrase, I consider myself an anarchist and 
I’d say I believe everything that I’ve ever written 
about it, I just think it’s hard to have a really 
gung-ho political band when most bands like 
that really don’t put any of their lyrics into 
practice. 

P.P.: Do you guys come from a big political 
scene in Portland? 

Mike: No, not really. 

Kelly: It’s mainly, pretty much, political bands 
talking about doing shit and not doing shit at 
all. I mean there’s a few active individuals. 
There’s an active Food Not Bombs group, but 
most the political groups in Portland just end 
up self-destructing after awhile after a lot of 
soap-opera crap. People really just can’t seem 
to get along. There was anti-racist action and 
all that stuff I think even an A.Y.F. was at- 
tempted at one point, but people don’t work 
well with each other. 


P.P. So, why’d you de- 
cide to start your own 
record label? 

Kelly: Pretty much be- 
cause there’s a lot of 
really good bands out 
there that no one has 
ever heard of and I re- 
ally wanna do my best 
to promote them. It’s 
up to people to keep 
doing underground la- 
bels and keep releasing 
things by underground 
bands just to keep the 
punk scene going. Ire- 
ally can’t seem to get 
myself to do enough as 
far as the punk scene 
goes. I am always really 
frustrated that I’m not 
doing enough. That’s 
why I end up totally over extending myself 
and coming close to nervous breakdowns all 
the time. It really frustrates me to see people 
not doing that sort of thing, ya know: not doing 
zines, not doing labels, not doing bands, so I 
figured I’ll just do as much as I can and 
hopefully people will follow the example. 
There’s a lot of really underrated, really cool 
bands out there that no one’s ever heard of 
and hopefully I can try and promote them. 
P.P. (whispering): Nihilism [our band!. 

Kelly (before hearing us): There’s a lot of shit 
coming out right now, hopefully I can do my 
part to counteract that. 

P.P.fWill): One of the guys where I work, 
which is basically a center for hicks, was 
wondering where in the world do you guys 
work with crazy hair and tattoos like you 
have? It’s not my question; he wanted me 
to ask you. 

Mike: We all work different shitty jobs. 

P.P. (Jon); I heard one of you worked at Sub- 
way for a time. 

Mike: Yeh, Eric did. 

P.P.(Jon): That’s where I work. It’s punk 
rock. 

Kelly: I work in an appliance parts ware- 
house. 










P.P.(Will): Hey, I work in a warehouse too! 
Kelly: Heeey, we have our share of hicks to 
deal with, but after awhile they get used to it. 
We still get hair jokes every once-in-awhile, 
but it’s all in fun I think. It’s not really that 
malicious. Our employers are pretty cool. 
They’re letting us take a month and a half off 
to tour. 

P.P.(Matt): Do you have any good tour sto- 
ries? 

P.P.fWill): Why don’t you tell us about all 
your crazy instances. 

P.P.(Jon): We’ve only got a 1 10 minute tape. 
P.P.fWill): Ok, why don’t you tell us about 
the funny ones. 

Kelly: Well, we’ve had a lot of adventures on 
tour, not many of them funny. Mike had an 
adventure a few days ago, would you like to 
tell them about that? 

Mike: Not particularly. It seems like you can 
do pretty much anything you want in South 
Carolina except call a highway patrolman a 
“dumb hick.” 

(laughter) 

Mike: Some of these guys went out, I wasn’t 
there, they went out all drunk and went joy- 
riding around to say the least. 

Kelly: Side-swiping cars and smashing cars. 
Mike: They got pulled over... you continue. 
Kelly: We almost all ended up in jail that night 
cause we took the van out and did basically 
that and got pulled over. We got pulled over 
and at that point we were pretty much so 
drunk thac we couldn’t even stand and we 


were trying to explain to the police officers... we 
gave them the old “we are from out of town” 
routine. 

Mike: We didn’t know we couldn’t hang out 
the van smashing cars with baseball bats. 1 
Kelly: We didn’t realize you couldn’t drive by 
cars with a baseball bat and smash their 
windshields. We didn’t realize you couldn’t 
play windshield baseball. After like half-an- 
hour of talking to these cops... 

Mike: Passing the drunk driving test. 

Kelly: They tried to give one to Lee, the bass 
player from The Inhumane [who they were 
touring with]. They made him walk the line 
and he took one step and he couldn’t do it. 
The cop said, “Come on son be honest with 
me; how many beers have you had?” and he 
said, “Fuck, I won’t lie to you. I’m wasted!” 
Miraculously enough they let us go. The cop 
got in the van and pulled it off the side of the 
road and sent us on our way only to find out 
when we got home, in the early morning 
hours, that one of us wasn’t quite as lucky as 
we were in their police encounter. They’re 
pretty lenient there. If you insult their fragile 
little egos... 

Mike: If you basically call them what they 
are... 

Kelly: The cops are sensitive in Columbia. 
P.P.: They’re 90’s cops. 

Mike: That’s one of the many little clever 
things that we’ve done. 

Kelly: Just wait for the rumors to start flying. 
Mike: What else clever happened? We lost 
somebody in New York. 


Kelly: He lost it and left. He lost himself. 
Mike: Inhumane lost a singer there also. He 
just decided to move to New York that night. 
Must have had some kind of impression on 
him... 

Kelly: We’ve done a lot of fun things... went 
swimming a couple times, met a lot of cool 
people. Developed some hatreds. 

Mike: We got to know each other as people a 
lot better than we meant to. 

Kelly: Or should have... 

P.P.: Do you guys have any new albums or 
7-inches or splits coming out? 

Kelly: Pretty soon after wq get back hopefully 
the new EP will be out. 

Mike: It’s already been recorded so it 
shouldn’t be too hard to get it out. 

Kelly: We’re thinking about doing a spilt 5" 
with a German band, yet to be determined. 
It’ll be a collaboration between my label and 
a German label. I get to choose a band and 
he gets to choose one. Hopefully by next year 
we’ll have an LP We’ll be on a couple comps 
too. 

P.P. Do you guys have any addresses, com- 
ments, anything? 

Kelly: We have plenty of comments... best left 
unsaid. 

Mike: Just give us a topic... 

Kelly: If anybody wants any info on the band 
or my label, Consensus Reality, write to 1951 
West Burnside #1654; Portland, OR 97209. 





ews 




Blanks ‘77 are a great pogo punk 
band that I managed to catch on 
their nationwide “You Go” tour. 
They played with Submachine to 
create what was probably the 
heaviest show I’ve ever seen live. 
Before they played my ever- 
present friend Matt and I talked 
to them outside the club. The 
pudding is apparently some MTV/ 
inside joke thing with them. ..I 
don't really understand. -Will 
Dandy 

P.P.: To begin, who are you and what 
do you play? 

Renee: I’m mike and I sing... no... I’m 
Renne and I play guitar. 

P.P.: How’d the band get started? 
Renee: Do you want the true version 
or the fake one? 

P.P.: The true version... no both. 
Renee: There was an ad in the paper 
that I put in and Mike and Chad an- 
swered it and that’s how I met them 
and we’ve gone through two other 
bass players and Tim is our new bass 
player. He joined up in February and 
he’s the only one that we’ve all gotten 
along with so far. The other two 
didn’t work out. 

P.P.: What’s the fake version? 
Renee: Chad and Mike met me at a 
strip bar called Frank’s Chicken 
house at which I was working and 
they picked me up (laughter) and 
that’s how we met. Actually I’m not 
a stripper, never have been, never will 
be. 

Mike (to Renee): Tell him about the 
pudding. 

Renee (to Mike): He’s gonna ask me 
about the pudding later, I told him 
to ask me. 

Mike: Make sure you ask about the 
pudding. 

P.P.: Ok, I’ll save that for later. Do 
you have any favorite tour stories or 
any stories at all? 

Renee: Last night I walked over to 
tell him what song we were gonna do 
and I was walking back and tripped 
over something and fell right down. 
Tim: She tripped over a Mike’s cord. 











Renee: I tripped over a Mike’s mi- 
crophone cord and fell right down 
and continued playing and only 
missed like one note and Chad our 
drummer didn’t even see it. Mike 
usually is the one who falls down, 
but I did last night. I was very proud 
of myself. 

P.P.: Pretty impressive... falling down 
out of drunkenness or just random 
something or another? 

Renee: No, if it was because I was 
drunk it probably would have been 
cooler and I didn’t know what the hell 
was going on, all of a sudden I was 
just airborne and then I hit the 
ground and I said, “Well, I might as 
well just keep playing.” So, I laid on 
the ground and played the rest of the 
song. 

P.P.: So, what are the politics behind 
the band? 

Renee: Oh, there’s no politics... no... I 
mean... 

P.P.: Just plain punk rock fun? 
Renee: We like to have more fun, we 
don’t preach anything. 

P.P.: So, If you could crush anything 
in one of those big car crushing 
things that they have at dumps what 
would you crush? 

Renee: (long silence) The van be- 
cause I never want to go in it again 
after riding in it for fifteen straight 
hours, it’s fuckin’ hell. 

P.P.: Is it your van? 

Renee: It’s our bass player’s, actu- 
ally he just sold his soul to buy that 
to bring it on tour. 

P.P.: So, that’s why you’re letting him 
stay on as the bass player. . . 

Renee: Shhh... don’t tell him... Don’t 
tell him! 

(laughter) 

P.P.: Sorry... 

Renee: As soon as the tour is over 
we’re gonna kick him out. Shh, don’t 
tell him, it’s a secret. 

P.P.: So... how ‘bout that pudding? 
Renee: I’m happy you asked me 
about the pudding. Because you 
might say to yourself, “where did you 
get $240 worth of pudding?” You 
coulda had a $100 worth of pudding, 
and that would have been a lot of 
puddin’. We had the 240 we had to 


get the pudding. Thank you for 
asking me about the pudding 
by the way... You’ve never seen 
that on MTV? 

P.P.: No, I don’t get cable. 
Renee: No one gets it, everyone 
wants to kill us at this point. 
P.P.: Do you have any records 
or new releases coming out? 
Renee: Yeah, we’ve got, well the 
newest thing that we’ve got with 
us right now is our 10” (Up the 
System) and we’re coming out 
with a picture disc on Headache 
records, a picture 7”. 

P.P.: When is it going to be out? 
Renee: Well, when we get back 
all we have to do is take our pic- 
ture. It’s recorded; everything 
is recorded, so once we get the 
picture done...ya 

know... however long it takes to 
make. 

P.P.: How many other releases 
do you have out? 

Renee: Two 7”s, the 10”, three 
tapes, and we recorded like fif- 
teen songs, we’re gonna be on 
like a bunch of different com- 
pilations. There’s this one com- 
pilation about drinking, it’s 
coming out and we have a song 
on that and a bunch of other 
ones. 

P.P.: Do you have any juicy gos- 
sip about anyone? 

Renee: Mike and Chad are hav- 
ing a homosexual love affair. 
Their girl friends don’t know. 
This is all of the record by the 
way. Submachine [the band 
they’re touring with] is now go- 
ing to kill Ajax [guitarist for 
Aus-Rotten filling in for missing 
Submachine guitarist] because 
we now have him saying, 
“puddin’” at al possible mo- 
ments in time. 

P.P.: So, do you have any last 
comments or an address where 
people can reach you? 

Renee: Yeah, if they wanna buy 
our stuff or write to us or any- 
thing it’s 1303 Myrtle St; Hill- 
side, NJ 07205. 

P.P.: Thanks. 






i 


erviews 




PRDPABANDHI 


P.P.: Is there a big anarchist or un- 
derground political scene in Canada? 

Jord: In Canada as a whole? I think 
I it is in various different regions. Where we 
I live... would you catagorize it as anarchist? 

Chris: No, not in the punk rock sense 
I of the word like Profane Existence or stuff, 
but there’s people from different back- 
grounds, even different cultural back- 
grounds, getting together and networking 
along the same sort of lines, towards some 
sort of anti- authoritarian thing, but it’s not 
| classified like the A.Y.F. or anything. 

P.P.: Why did you make your 7" cover 
| over the NO-FX album? 

Chris: Cause we didn’t know what size 
I the 7" cover should be, so we just grabbed a 
7" cover with NO-FX on it and drew all over 
it. 


the world. I think more people have died as 
a result of U.S. foreign policy than all the 
people that have died in all the wars put to 
gether in the world pre-1945. I think it’s 
insane. I think it’s the world’s biggest ter- 
rorist organization, the U.S. government. 

John: And yet the Canadian govern- 
ment acts as a lap dog and a henchman tc 
that. j 

Jord: Yeah, but it a much lesser form 
Chris: Even beyond all that it’s just £ 
safer place to be. 

P.P.: Are there guns in Canada? 
Chris: There’s guns, but not like here 
John: There’s no handguns. 

Jord: I’m not trying to paint a pretty 
picture of Canada. The government there 
has been involved in cultural genocide of the 
native peoples all over the countiy ever since 
the start of the government there. 


In case you’ve missed them 
Propagandhi is a great Canadian, melodic 
hardcore band. They recently played some- 
where in my town and before their excel- 
lent show, my friends Matt Berland, Jon 
Entropy and I took the oppurtunity to in- 
terview them. They’re really nice guys and 
play awesome music. Be sure to check them 
out for yourself! 

Punk Planet: Who are you and what 
do you play? 

Jord: Me name Jord, I play drums. 

John: and I’m John and I play bass. 

Chris: and I’m Chris and I do the rest. 

P.P.: Oh.. .What’s that? 

Chris: The trombones and stuff like 

that... 

P.P.: How’d you guys get started? 

Jord: Me and Chris went to grade ten 
together. Chris moved to the city, I stayed 
in a small town. I went to the city two years 
later to go to the university. We talked about 
doing a band for about two years, then fi- 
nally we started jamming, met John and 
we started playing. 


P.P.: Who would you say has most in- 
fluenced you sound? 

Everyone : (random insults pointed at 
Jon for asking THAT question...) 

Chris: (in deep scary voice) Venom! 

Jord: You mean our style for how we 
play our instruments?... For drumming, I don’t 
know, it’s like anything from Rush to Van 
Halen to Goverment Issue to the Subhumans. 

P.P.: Make up a question and answer 
it... ask a different band member. 

Chris: When are you getting your 
mohawk John? 

John: Soon Chris, very soon. 

P.P.: Interesting... so... tell us something 
generic about the differences between Canada 
and the U.S. A. 

Jord: In a way I’d say that it’s different, 
but alot the same. 

P.P.: Which is better? 

Chris: Better? I don’t think there’s a 
better. I think there’s a less worse. 

Jord: I’d have to say that that’d be 
Canada just cause of the historic treatment 
by the U.S. of other cultures and how it eco- 
nomically dominates alot of other societies in 




(gram 


erviews 




P.P.: As far as politics go, are you guys 
more into the resistance through legislation 
or are you into that revolution, destroy, blow 
it up thing? 

Chris: I don’t think you can seperate 
the two, really. If you start working for 
change within the system, then I’m sure 
after a few years you just develop a case for 
nihilism. Obviously there’s just some thigns 


port people destroying things the way they 
are now because I think that alternative of 
having no system right now would much 
worse then this shitty one that we have to- 
day. 

Chris: Yeah, because everyone’s con- 
ditioned so badly. There’s two things. It’s 
way easier to destroy than create, which is 
an argument for not destroying. Just that it 


John: I could sympathise with with 
people who have had much worse sufferings 
than I have. 

Jord: Right now I’d be more content to 
just, I don’t know, observe things. 

John: I think I can see that argument 
used for the Zapatistas, but I can’t really see 
it for myself. But I see what Chris means by 
that. I think local grass-roots action involving 
people from all classes and automous 
organisations that are usually, without fail, 
outside of the punk scene, are really impor- 
tant things to be involved in. Actually, the 
only important thing to be involved in. 


P.P.: bo you sorta moved Irom metal 
to punk then. 

Chris: Venom is the reason I’m still 
alive today, I think. 

John: I came from the other direc- 
tion. 

Chris: He was in the city though, and 
had more access to ideas. 

John: Yeah, I grew up in the suburbs 
land stuff. 

P.P. (Jokingly): Do you skate? 

Jord: Nobody in the band skates or 
lever will skate. 

John: Iceskate! 

Chris: We don’t skate, we have no tat- 
toos, and no piercings, and no colored hair, 
land Jord has a mustache. 

John: And no mohawks either. 

P.P.: Do you have any last comments? 

Chris: Minimilize your particpation in 
[the capitalist system, however you can. Go 
|vegan or vegetarian. 

John (muttering): At least... 

Chris: Have a sense of humor about 
[it all, I guess. 

Jord: Legalize hemp. 

Chris: Our address is P.O. Box 3-905 
ICorydon Ave; Winnipeg, MB R3M 3S3; 
ICanada. 

P.P.: Thanks alot. 


Chris: Yeah, the punk scene will 
only ever represent a cultural revolution 
at best, and it will be a tiny one. 

(eerie silence) 

P.P.: After that a question like, 

“Is Venom really your biggest influence?” 
would be really assinine, so I’m not gonna 
ask that. 

Chris: Well, they were a huge influ- 
ence because where I came from, and sorta 
where Jord came from too, there was re- 
ally no way to access punk rock because 
the only thing we knew about it was that 
there was a band called the Sex Pistols, 
and I thought it was stupid. 

Jord: ...or the Clash. 

Chris: Yeah, but it was so low pro- 
file for me and then everyone liked Iron 
Maiden and Judas Priest and if you didn’t 
like them you were an asshole. I grew up 
on a military base and I hated everyone 
and I found this record one day with a pen- 
tagram on the front and everyone hated 
Venom so I bought it, and it was basically 
a punk rock band. For the next seven years 
I just bought all the speed metal stuff. 

Jord: That influenced me too be- 
cause he had these records that I'd never 
heard before and I was like, “Holy fuck this 
is insane!” 








O Lord, these 
people make me 
sick. All they ever 
talk about is filth. 


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I lean on the counter staring out the 
kitchen window. From the next room I can 
hear Joy Division. I’ve been listening to them 
all day. The song is ‘The Eternal,” which 
has got to be one of the saddest, most 
wretched songs that has ever been written. 

Once, when I was really depressed - no, 
not like now, I mean really, really depressed 
- 1 put the CD player on repeat, and listened 
to that song 27 times in a row while I lay 
there on my bed completely out of my mind 
and mostly out of my body from a combina- 
tion of valium, codeine, and Canadian whis- 
key. Somehow I’d gotten the idea that if I. 
made myself sad enough I could just will 
myself dead, and that song would be the 
one to do the trick. 

It didn’t work, although up to about the 
twenty-fifth time, I really thought it might. 
After that I just got bored, and then I never 
listened to that CD again for about a year or 
two. Didn’t even listen to Joy Division at all, 
in fact, which is kind of weird when you think 
about how other times I get totally obsessed 
with them, the way I am now. 

If you’re familiar with ‘The Eternal,” you 
know how it’s got that stately bass line, and 
then the piano comes in all majestic -like, 
and the first thing the singer starts talking 
about is “the procession moves on.” And 
you can see it, shrouded figures moving in 
time to the music, moving through the thick- 
est, densest fog there ever was, past a stone 
wall overhung by a twisted old oak with bare 
branches black against the forever sky. 

But it’s not figures I see now, and there’s 
no wall, and the oak tree on the edge of my 
garden is mostly white from the wet snow 
that clings to it. The flakes, enormous, gar- 
ishly shaped ones, move in time to the mu- 
sic. It’s not my imagination. I can see it 
right in front of me: every time the music 
strikes another of those mournful notes, the 
whole set of snowflakes arrayed across my 
window moves one more increment toward 
the ground. 



OF A 

Oisco 0ANCER 


by Larry Livermore 


Already the road is impassable. If this 
keeps up, the snow will be at least three 
feet deep by morning. It might be a month 
before I can get out of here. I’m glad, or at 
least I don’t care. I don’t want to go any- 
where, and this gives me the perfect excuse. 

The last time I was snowed in here - 
that must be ten years ago, no, twelve. We 
were just kids; Anne was still living here, 
and it was a big adventure riding out the 
storm together. This will be different. 
There’s plenty of food this time, even if it’s 
only spaghetti and rice. But nobody to talk 
to, just a piano, a guitar, and all those books 
I’ve been meaning to read for years. I just 
went over to set the CD player to repeat ‘The 
Eternal” a few more times, and while I was 
away from the window - not more than a 
couple minutes - I’d swear the snow got an 
inch deeper just like that. 

Two weeks ago I was listening to the 
same song and watching the same sort of 
snowflakes fall across my window on the 
other side of the world. The difference was 
that in London the snow rarely sticks to the 
ground, and even when it does, it doesn’t 
usually last more than a day or two. So 
even though the view out my window might 
have looked every bit as fantastic, it was all 


rather meaningless, rather like one of those 
glass balls that you shake to create a snow- 
storm. 

Here in the mountains of northern Cali- 
fornia, snow can be a very serious matter - 
life and death, in fact, if you’re not prepared 
for it. In London it’s largely decorative, and 
at worst, a picturesque inconvenience. I re- 
ally appreciated it that particular day, 
though, even though I was a little worried 
that it might close the airport and delay my 
flight back to California. 

Normally the prospect of returning to 
-California makes me gloomy, even resent- 
ful, but this was one time I was glad to be 
going. For once I’d had my fill of London. 
-The grey skies and soot-covered tenements 
that usually make my heart sing with a de- 
lightful sort of melancholy had begun to 
nearly sicken me. 

As I watched the snow slip past my win- 
dow that afternoon, I was seized with an 
abrupt but brief burst of panic. For that 
moment, I really did think that London was 
on the verge of being snowed under. But by 
walking across the room and looking down 
at the dark, wet street where the snow had 
barely accumulated at all, I allayed my fears, 
and was able to return to the brooding that 
had occupied me all day long. 

It was a Sunday - days like that very 
nearly always are - and I hadn’t slept all 
weekend. I usually stay up quite late any- 
way, and hadn’t even started to think about 
going to bed when the knock at the door 
came about 3:30 Saturday morning. 

It was a firm knock, and an inconsid- 
erately loud one for that hour. I. immedi- 
ately sensed that it meant trouble, but then, 
I usually think of any intrusion on my pri- 
vacy as trouble. The knock had an air of 
authority that made it impossible for me to 
ignore, though normally I have no trouble 
doing just that to unexpected callers. In 
the year I’d spent in London, I’d grown quite 
accustomed to being alone; in fact the de- 
sire to be alone was one of my main reasons 
for being there. 








As I said, I expected trouble, but I didn’t 
expect to see the police. I had been think- 
ing more along the lines of a drunken ac- 
quaintance who had suddenly decided that 
I was his best friend and needed at that very 
moment to hear his life story in copious de- 
tail. Or perhaps it was a gang of robbers, 
who would tie me up and beat me merci- 
lessly, or the landlord calling to reclaim his 
flat, or a telegram informing me that my 
parents had suddenly passed away with a 
revised will that left me nothing at all. 

But it was indeed the police, four of 
them, and they looked more serious than I 
cared to see them looking. They studied me 
with more than casual interest while one of 
them asked, “Are you acquainted with a Mr. 
Paul Stead, sir?’’ 

“Yes, he lives in the flat across the road,” 
I answered, bewildered by this line of ques- 
tioning. 

“And are you a friend of his?” 

‘That would be hard to say. I haven’t 
seen him in some time, except occasionally 
passing in the street.” I didn’t explain that 
I had seen Paul passing more than occa- 
sionally, but it had mostly been while I was 
essentially spying on him from my window. 

He had made it clear that we had little 
or nothing to talk about, and I had begun to 
feel so awkward that I would retreat back 
into my building if there was a chance of 
meeting him on the street. From above I 
would study him for any sign that he was 
aware of my presence, or that he might be 
thinking about what had gone on between 
us. 

Or had anything gone on at all? Had I 
turned a casual flirtation, a pleasant affair, 
into far more than it was ever meant to be? 
That had been one of Paul’s favorite charges 
back when we used to have those discus- 
sions about who had done what to whom. 

"Maybe you imagined something very 
different from what I saw or felt,” was the 
way he liked to put it. I thought it a bru- 
tally insensitive thing to say, for I knew be- 
yond a doubt that he had once felt very 
strongly about me. So strongly, in fact, that 
I found it impossible to understand how he 
could claim to have no feelings at all now. 

Nothing drastic had changed; there 
hadn’t been any fight or argument, nothing 
more than the everyday flareups of tension 
that you expect between people who are ex- 


tremely close. There had just been that day, 
when, after a week of avoiding me and mak- 
ing pathetic excuses every time I’d invited 
him to do something, he’d hit me with, “I 
don’t feel the same way about you anymore.” 
Without even waiting to find out what 
way he did feel about me, I went into a tail- 
spin that had me sobbing one moment and 
angrily denouncing him the next. He was 
ungrateful, he was insensitive, he didn’t 
know what he was doing, I should never have 
wasted so much of my valuable time on him, 
you know, all the cliches that spurned lov- 
ers heap upon the one who has rejected 
them. 

After we’d separated that day, Paul 
made a few token efforts to communicate 
with me, but I rudely rebuffed him. Either 
he was going to be my lover as before, or I 
was determined to feel nothing but contempt 
for him. Before you judge me too harshly 
for that, please bear in mind that I had never 
felt very secure in anyone’s affections, and 
even my most passionate loves had been 
discolored by a persistent mistrust. Put very 
simply, I could not comprehend why or how 
anyone could truly love me, and as a result, 
few people did, and of those few who did, 
none could stay with me once they learned 
the scope of the demands I placed upon 
them. 

All of these thoughts raced through my 
brain - as they had a thousand times before 
- in the time it took the police officer to form 
his next sentence: “When did you last see 
Mr. Stead?” 

‘To speak to? Or just see him?” 

An almost invisible hint of irritation flit- 
ted across the unruffled countenance that I 
once thought they issued as standard equip- 
ment to British police. “When did you last 
see him?” he repeated. 

"Urn, tonight, I mean last night, I mean 
to say earlier this evening, about 9 o’clock.” 
‘That would be Friday evening, at about 
9 o’clock? And did you speak to him at that 
time?” 

“No, I just saw him going by in the 
street. I was looking out the window.” 

"And have you had any further contact 
with Mr. Stead since then?” 

“No, that was the last time I saw him.” 
“You didn’t speak to him on the tele- 
phone after that?” 


“I told you, we haven’t spoken in some 
time.” 

“Bit of a lover’s tiff, then?” His eyebrows 
arched ever so slightly to match the tone of 
his voice. 

“I’m not sure that’s anybody else’s busi- 
ness.” I said it as politely as possible, but it 
still sounded rude. That’s the way it is with 
the British, though; they can just stand 
there looking at you and make you feel un- 
couth. 

“I’m not sure either, but I suspect that 
it might be. Would you get your coat, please? 
I’m going to have to ask you to go with us.” 

“What? Am I under arrest? What’s go- 
ing on?” 

“You’re not under arrest at present. 
However I will have to ask you to accom- 
pany us, and you may be charged with an 
offense if you refuse.” 

As we drove through the mostly de- 
serted streets, I tried to pump them for in- 
formation, but they weren’t talking. One of 
the cops finally told me, not very politely, to 
shut up. 

We hadn’t driven very far, but we’d been 
going so fast, and by an unusual route, that 
I’d lost track of where we were. Suddenly I 
recognized the familiar sights of Notting Hill 
Gate. Just a few blocks farther on, the car 
pulled to a quick stop at the walkway com- 
ing out of Holland Park. There were half a 
dozen cop cars there already; the place was 
lit up like a Christmas tree with all the flash- 
ing red and blue lights. 

One of the cops bundled me out of the 
back seat and half led, half pushed me up 
the walkway. Some detectives were stand- 
ing there, one with a notepad, and a pho- 
tographer looked like he was getting ready 
to take some pictures. That’s when I no- 
ticed the blanket lying on the pavement. 

Well, more precisely, it was covering 
something lying on the pavement, and while 
I didn’t want to think about what that some- 
thing might be, I was beginning to have a 
sneaking suspicion it wouldn’t be pretty. 

It wasn’t. At a nod from the officer, one 
of the detectives flicked the blanket aside. 
It was a body, all right. At first glance, you 
might have thought it was a drunk who’d 
passed out, but it didn’t take long to spot 
the blood. There was a lot of it, on the pave- 
ment, and covering much of the poor guy’s 
face. The initial wave of horror hadn’t quite 






finished washing over me when I started 
wondering why I’d been brought here to see 
this. In the same instant, the detective 
turned his flashlight directly on what was 
left of the face and said, “Recognize him?” 
Suddenly it dawned on me, and I really 
didn’t even have to look anymore to know 
that it was Paul. In fact, as soon as I’d given 
the unbloodied portion of his features 
enough of a once -over to satisfy myself, I 
deliberately turned away and refused to look 
at him again. 


and it was getting on toward dawn. Or at 
least I thought it was; with a rude start I 
realized that what I had taken for the first 
bleary gray light of morning was really com- 
ing from a bank of flourescent tubes down 
the hallway, and that here, somewhere in 
the bowels of the district headquarters, no 
natural light ever intruded. 

What was the nature of my relationship 
with Mr. Stead. “I’m not quite sure,” I said, 
in all honesty, though of course they thought 
I was stalling for time. The detectives stood 
and sat in a semi-circle around me, some 


running commentary about why the north 
of England was superior in very nearly ev- 
eiy way to the cold-hearted and mercenary 
south. “It’s only too bad a bloke’s got not 
much choice but to come south if he wants 
a hope of doing ought for himself.” 

His smile was rueful at that thought, 
but a moment later, he had grown enthusi- 
astic once more about London and its pos- 
sibilities, its night life, its style. “I didn’t 
want to come here, it’s true, but I’ll make 



“Not a very pleasant sight, is it?” I didn’t 
know which one of the cops had spoken. I 
didn’t care. 

“Can you identify the victim?” said an- 
other. 

“Yes,” I said, with difficulty. “It’s Paul 
Stead.” 

“You don’t seem that surprised to see 
him like this.” 

“What’s that supposed to mean? You 
come drag me out of my house at 3:30 in 
the morning asking questions about Paul 
Stead, then you show me his body with his 
face all smashed in. What do you expect 
me to do? Scream and throw myself around 
like this was some Hollywood movie? He 
and I were once very close. We’re not any- 
more. But I still cared about him. A lot. 
I’m in shock, what else can I say?” 

Nobody answered me. I looked around 
the circle of cops. They seemed more like 
an audience watching me on stage, and I 
was supposed to be the one who knew what 
comes next. 

Finally, when it became obvious that I 
wasn’t going to say anything else, one of the 
detectives looked me hard in the eye and 
said, “What exactly was the nature of your 
relationship with Mr. Stead?” 

It wasn’t so much that I didn’t want to 
answer, but that I didn’t know how to even 
begin answering. I asked myself the same 
question, and it set my brain whirling until 
it felt like my whole body was being dragged 
along with it, and the last thing I remem- 
bered for a while was puking my guts out 
into some nearby bushes. 

“What exactly was the nature of your 
relationship with Mr. Stead?” There was that 
question again, only now I was seated in an 
interrogation room surrounded by detectives 


with sympathetic, tell-me-a-story looks on 
their faces, others emanating sheer menace 
of the let’s-have-it-before-we-beat-it-out-of- 
you variety. I focused my attention on the 
kinder expressions, and let my thoughts 
wander over the previous year, not taking 
any particular notice of exactly what I said. 

I honestly didn’t care what I told the cops; I 
was more interested in answering the ques- 
tion for myself. 

I met him in the Portobello Cafe, just 
after I’d gotten back from that crazy trip to 
Czechoslovakia. He saw me looking at a 
fanzine I’d picked up there - and I mean look- 
ing, because I don’t understand a word of 
Czech, and leaned across the table to ask, 
“What the bloody hell sort of language is 
that?” 

Funny thing was, he had such a thick 
accent he might as well have been speaking 
Czech himself. Well, all right, I’m exagger- 
ating; with some effort I could make out 
about every other word, and once I’d gotten 
used to the way his voice would rise and 
fall, I was able to understand him pretty well. 

He was from Newcastle, a Geordie, he 
called it, and he was new to London. Just 
moved into his new flat, and started at his 
first proper job. “Two years I spent on the 
dole in Newcastle, and then I’m not here in 
London two days before I’ve got a bang-on 
job and a top flat. Don’t know why every- 
one says London’s so hard.” He flashed a 
winning smile. “Of course the people aren’t 
so friendly here as they are up north.” 

He caught himself there, as if he’d just 
recalled that he was talking to a Londoner. 
He hadn’t given me a chance to say more 
than a few words; once I did, he realized 
that I wasn’t English at all, and was off on a 


the best of it, I will. When I get back to 
Newcastle I’ll have a pile of money, I reckon. 
In the meantime I’ll have a pile of fun here.” 
Bright and cheery people normally get 
on my nerves; it’s just not in my nature to 
look on the sunny side of life. Paul was dif- 
ferent, though. Most of those cockeyed op- 
timists, the whole time they’re talking about 
how grand life is, you’re getting the feeling 
that what they’re really saying is “Isn’t my 
life grand. Too bad about yours, old chap.” 
But when Paul enthused about his job 
or his flat or London, he made it seem like it 
was your good fortune too. It was easy to 
see why he’d been able to establish himself 
so quickly; he had a knack for making 
friends, and for making people care about 
him. Hell, by the time we’d been talking 
half an hour, I would have invited him to 
move into my flat if I thought he needed a 
place. 

No, it’s not what you’re thinking; it 
wasn’t about sex or love - though that stuff 
would come later; I just really liked the guy. 
But I still didn’t have any idea that our rela- 
tionship was meant to be anything more 
than a pleasant chat in a cafe, not until I 
told him that I really had to be getting home, 
and got up to leave. 

“Which way are you going, then? I’m 
on my way home as well. Perhaps we can 
walk together for a while.” 

“Down Lancaster Road and then over 
to Blenheim Crescent,” I told him, and his 
eyes lit up. 

“Why, that’s the very way I’m going. You 
don’t mind the company, do you?” 

And as we strolled along Blenheim Cres- 
cent and he showed no signs of turning off, 
I began to wonder if we might not be near 




neighbors. How near didn’t become obvi- 
ous until we’d stopped right across the street 
from my building. 

When I told him so, he looked so sur- 
prised that I very nearly thought he was fak- 
ing it, that he was playing some sort of game, 
perhaps running some sort of hustle, but 
then I remembered that the flat on the top 
floor directly across from me had been va- 
cant for ages. Sure enough, he was the one 
who’d taken it. 

Not having any especially close friends 
in London - well, to be honest, having al- 
most no friends at all - this came as excit- 
ing news to me. I wasn’t that good at meet- 
ing people, and generally I waited for them 
to come to me. That sort of thing seems to 
work better in America, though, where 
people are more outgoing. If you want to be 
left alone, England’s the place to be; at least 
that’s how it had worked out for me so far. 

From then on I saw Paul just about 
every day. He got in the practice of calling 
in on his way home from work each night to 
tell me the latest news and gossip, and we’d 
usually spend most of the evening together, 
either in his flat or mine. Sometimes we’d 
go out for dinner, but Paul soon let it be 
known that he liked to cook, something I in 
turn hated to do, so many a night would be 
spent hanging about in his kitchen, laugh- 
ing and drinking beer while he prepared one 
of his elaborate meals that took hours to 
cook and about twenty minutes to devour. 

What was odd was that for the longest 
time the thought of this being anything more 
than an excellent friendship never crossed 
my mind. Why I say that’s odd is that I 


I guess the feelings were there all along, 
so strong just under the surface that I didn’t 
need to think about them consciously, be- 
cause the night everything changed, the 
night we stayed up drinking and talking far 
later than usual, and the candles burned 
down to almost nothing, and streetlight 
stirred through windtossed branches filled 
the front room and we tumbled wordlessly 
into a chaotic tangle of bed sheets on the 
mattress in the middle of the floor, well, de- 
spite all that, it was as though nothing had 
really changed, that this was merely part of 
what was supposed to happen all along. 

But I was fooling myself, Paul said, and 
perhaps he was right. Certainly this was 
the beginning of the time when we no longer 
spoke and thought and acted as one. He 
never showed the slightest reluctance to 
carry on as lovers, which, without either of 
us ever mentioning the word, was obviously 
what we’d become. At the same time, he 
never showed the slightest sign that his feel- 
ings toward me were anything more or dif- 
ferent than they’d been all along, that of a 
brilliantly close friend. 

You’d think anyone in his right mind 
would be satisfied with that, but then you 
probably wouldn’t know me very well. I’m 
not the kind to be satisfied with anything, 
especially when it comes to leaving well 
enough alone. I started badgering him about 
how did he really feel, that sort of neurotic 
lover’s nagging that’s sure enough to drive 
anyone nuts, let alone an Englishman who’s 
just not used to the American mania for 


Paul, he got angry with me. Which meant, 
of course, that from then on, I’d refer to his 
“disco” friends as a way of getting at him 
when we were fighting, which seemed to be 
happening more and more often. 

My objection to the dance scene, be- 
sides the fact that it was taking Paul away 
from me, was that it seemed so horribly 
superficial. Everything involved images and 
poses. I couldn’t picture people huddled 
alongside the dance floor engaged in linger- 
ing conversations about medieval history or 
ancient Greek philosophy, the sorts of things 
Paul and I had spent many happy hours 
discussing; instead, I imagined them fuss- 
ing over their hair and exchanging informa- 
tion about where to buy that fabulous new 
shirt so-and-so was wearing. 

I don’t know if it was merely a case of 
reality conforming to expectations, but on 
the one occasion I actually visited one of 
Paul’s clubs, it was every bit as awful as I’d 
pictured it. That entire night was a fiasco, 
and I realized later that it had pretty much 
marked the end of our relationship. 

It was a Friday night, I recall, and Paul 
and I had already argued earlier in the 
evening when he told me that he’d decided 
to go out to some new club with his friends 
instead of staying in with me as we’d 
planned. The usual push-and-pull ensued, 
with him saying, “You don’t understand, this 
is the first night of this great new club, it’s 
really quite a special occasion,” and me go- 
ing, “One more night of the same bloody 
disco music you can dance your brains out 
to any night of the week.” 



normally tend to have sex on the brain. At 
least most people who know me say that, 
and I tend to agree. 

I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me 
to think of Paul in romantic terms. He was 
definitely good looking, if not in all the ways 
that tend to appeal to me, certainly in 
enough of them. And he was smart, no 
doubt of that, though his knowledge tended 
to be of a more earthy and common sense 
variety, as opposed to my rarefied and book- 
ish ways. 


sharing every last bit of our feelings with 
everyone we know well enough to say hello 
to. 

What really drove a wedge between us, 
though, was when Paul started going to 
dance clubs. He’d acquired a whole circle 
of trendy friends at his work, people who 
seemed to spend most of their time, energy 
and money on clothes, hairstyles, and 
records, and whose social lives revolved 
around an endless round of late-night clubs 
with names like Rage, Trade, Lost, and 
Rude. To me they seemed like an updated 
90s version of disco, but when I said that to 


“It’s not disco, how many times do I have 
to tell you? It’s a whole new way of life, a 
new way of seeing, feeling, being. It’s sort of 
like the peace, love and harmony of the 60s, 
only updated for the modern world, to a 
more realistic urban setting. It’s about liv- 
ing life with your whole mind and body, not 
as some crabby, choked-off intellectual who 
only knows how to analyze and criticize." 

“It’s mindless disco music for a bunch 
of drugged up zombies!” I nearly shouted 
back. 

“Oh Christ, you sound nearly like my 
father,” he said, wearily, as he left. 






I sat brooding for a while; what Paul 
had said was getting to me. How dare he 
act as though I were some - what did he 
say? - crabby old intellectual? Reminded 
him of his father? I was barely three years 
older than he was. Just because I wasn’t a 
disco airhead... 

I decided I’d show him. I dressed up as 
flashily as I was capable of - normally I’m 
the sort of person who wears the same trou- 
sers and shirt until they’re dirty and then 
switches to another pair of trousers and shirt 
while I wash out the first - and set out in 
the direction of the club I’d heard Paul men- 
tion. 

It didn’t take long for disaster to set in. 
I had to change trains at Baker Street, and 
there I ran smack into Paul and his friends. 
My paranoid imagination probably made it 
worse than it really was, but I could see that 
Paul was seriously rattled. Even more 
clearly, I could see that his friends were 
wondering why Paul was even talking to this 
declasse person who looked as though he 
actually belonged on the London Under- 
ground. 

He stood in front of me, making great 
sweeping motions with his arms that at- 
tempted to explain without words why it was 
out of the question for me to tag along with 
him and his friends. They had already made 
plans , couldn’t I see? 

While Paul spoke with mute eloquence 
of this world of plans that so thoroughly ex- 
cluded me, I was momentarily amused to 
see a poorly nourished rat scurrying behind 
him to retrieve a soggy chip dropped by an 
even soggier drunk, then make a hasty exit 
through the legs of Paul’s far too well dressed 
friends. They tittered, half nervously, half 
gaily. Paul took it as his cue to whisper a 
meaningless goodbye. 

I rode the same train, but two cars re- 
moved. I stood in the same queue for the 
club, but while Paul and his friends gained 
instant admittance, I spent half an hour in 
the chilly night waiting my turn. Inside, the 
monotonous, thudding disco beat gave way 
to an even more monotonous, thudding funk 
beat. Luckily the club was huge, three sto- 


ries, each with its own bar, and two sepa- 
rate dance floors. I barely saw Paul in there, 
and when I did, he quickly moved in the 
opposite direction. 

His friends, though, weren’t so easily 
put off; a couple times I caught them star- 
ing at me from across the room and, at least 
in my imagination, smirking condescend- 
ingly in my direction. Determined to show 
that I was able as the next man to find my 
way in this brave new scene, I danced fe- 
verishly to music I mostly hated, but by 
midnight I couldn’t stick it out any longer. I 
knew that at midnight clubs like this were 
barely beginning to heat up, but suddenly I 
felt like an old man, and I didn’t even bother 
looking for Paul to say goodbye. 

It was a week and a day before I was to 
see him again. To be precise, it was about 
10 o’clock on a Sunday morning, which is 
at least a couple hours earlier than I usu- 
ally get up. London had been having one of 
its rare hot spells, and I found it very hard 
to sleep. I wandered down to the street, 
propelled by some ragged notion of heading 
for the shade of the park, when I saw Paul 
turn the comer. 

To be honest, the look that crossed his 
face was one of “What's the quickest way 
out of here?” but it lasted only a second; he 
realized he couldn’t veiy well turn and bolt 
from me in the blinding sunlight of a mid- 
summer morning. The panicked expression 
was immediately replaced by a sheepish one, 
and it was only then that I realized he was 
just now coming home from his night at the 
clubs. 

My first instinct was to assume that he 
had spent the night with someone else, and 
my face burned with jealousy, just as my 
heart threatened to smash its way out of 
my rib cage and splatter itself all over the 
warm asphalt. But as quickly as that emo- 
tion came, it vanished; I knew, somehow, or 
at least convinced myself, that nothing 
sexual or romantic had been involved, that 
he’d merely been dancing the night away in 
a mindless, frenetic haze. For some reason 
that bothered me nearly as much, though 
in a completely different way. 


It was a painful conversation that we 
held there on the pavement, one that 
couldn’t have lasted more than a minute, 
yet pretty well encompassed my entire year 
in London. Stranger still, I don’t remember 
a single word we said, but I’ll never forget 
what we talked about. 

In essence, it was that he had no fur- 
ther interest in me as either a friend or a 
lover, that in fact he found my company 
boring and tedious, and that I was genu- 
inely confused and misled if I thought the 
days and nights we had spent together 
amounted to anything more than the most 
casual of acquaintanceships. 

For some reason the heat didn’t bother 
me anymore. I staggered back to my flat, 
and didn’t come out again for three days. 
Most of the time I just lay there on the floor, 
occasionally wandering to the window on the 
chance that I might see Paul strolling by. I 
never did, except once on Tuesday night. It 
was after 10 o’clock, but because it was 
June, it was still light enough to make out 
the faces of his companions as they headed 
off toward what was doubtless another night 
of dancing and fun. They looked so care- 
free and young, and I, at 26, could feel my 
skin shriveling and desiccating with the 
onset of old age. It was going to last a long, 
long time, I could tell. 

The next day I packed a few things and 
went away. First I went to Brighton, but 
quickly realized that I’d come the wrong di- 
rection, being able to put only 75 miles be- 
tween myself and London before running 
smack up against the sea. I turned around 
and headed north, all the way to Scotland. 
The farther north I got, the more my pace 
slowed, and by the time I got to the Outer 
Hebrides, I was moving with the speed and 
sense of purpose of the sheep who were the 
main inhabitants of that land. 

I didn’t come back to London until Sep- 
tember brought the first blast of truly cold 
weather down from Iceland, but if I had 
hoped anything would change in my ab- 
sence, I was sadly mistakened. Summer 
still lingered here; the leaves hung thick in 












the yellow haze of early evenings, and the 
streets were alive with a restless energy that 
made me think incessantly of Paul. 

I knew not to knock at his door, so I 
watched the street. Finally, one morning, I 
saw him bringing milk and bread back from 
the comer shop. Fixing a late breakfast for 
a new friend, I wondered, or still on his own? 
I came close to injuring myself as I raced 
down the stairs to catch him, and managed 
to intercept him before he got to his door. 
Almost three months had passsed, but the 
only thing that showed in his expression was 
some minor annoyance, as though I were a 
salesman who wouldn’t take no for an an- 
swer. 

He wasn’t rude, at least not overtly; Paul 
would never do that. In fact he was down- 
right charming, laying his old Geordie ac- 
cent on thicker than seemed plausible after 
this much time in London, and with both 
firmness and the hint of a faint smile re- 
fused any and all invitations. It was clear 
that if it were up to him, we would probably 
never see each other again. 

I was very nearly broke, so leaving Lon- 
don again wasn’t an option. I drew the 
shades, listened to Joy Division and simi- 
larly dark stuff for days at a time, and waited 
for these feelings to pass. When they didn’t, 

I considered suicide, murder, a life of de- 
generacy, becoming a Zen monk. None of it 
seemed worth the bother. 

Somewhere in there my telephone got 
cut off, I guess because I hadn’t paid the 
bill all summer. It was so rare that I called 
anyone or anyone called me that it might 
have been weeks before I noticed. When I 
finally got around to sorting it out, the tele- 
phone company told me that I’d have to have 
a new number, that they’d already given my 
old number to someone else. 

Whatever, I said. Nobody knew the old 
number either. Except Paul, that is. All 
right, I knew perfectly well that the reason 
he wasn’t calling me now wasn’t that he 
didn’t know the new number, but it still did 
me a bit of good to imagine that it could be 
the reason. I decided to send him a letter 
and tell him, and just for good measure, I 
threw in a little poem that I wrote myself. 

Call me a sap; everyone else does. I 
know anybody, especially if they’re male, 
who writes poetiy much past the age of 20 
is a sad case, and if he’s doing it to impress 
M— 


some potential girl or boy friend, it’s just 
plain hopeless. Might as well hang yourself 
on their doorstep with a note pinnned to 
your chest that reads “I loved you but you 
didn’t understand.” 

So what. So I wrote him a poem. So it 
was stupid. At least I’m not embarrassed to 
have feelings, the way most people are. So 
here’s what I wrote; 

The summer holds its breath then wearily 
exhales, 
Winter sneaks around the corner wearing an 
audacious smirk, 

I stare into the lengthening shadows with 
eyes older than the dawn 
And cry like an orphaned child for that hope- 
less sprinkling of moments 
when we were young. 

Yeah, I know it’s not that great. I fig- 
ured Paul would laugh when he read it, at 
least for a few seonds before he crumpled it 
up and threw it away. But you never know. 
Paul didn’t seem like the kind of guy who 
usually had poems written to him. Maybe 
he’d be impressed, or at least slightly 
touched. 

But I mailed it, and never heard any- 
thing back from him. Like I told the police, 

I saw him in the street. As far as I had been 
concerned, he was gone out of my life, and 
now I guessed there wasn’t any longer any 
doubt about it. 

For the first time in about half an hour 
I realized that I hadn’t just been thinking to 
myself, but had been telling this story aloud 
to what now looked like about 20 cops. They 
stood and sat all around me, all staring at 
me, with looks on their faces that varied from 
genuine sympathy to genuine disgust. I 
swear I’m not making this up, either; one of 
the cops even looked a little teary-eyed. 

Somehow I sensed, though I wasn’t sure 
why, that I was no longer suspected of mur- 
der. The main cop, the one who’d been do- 
ing most of the talking, said quietly, “You’re 
free to go now. On behalf of myself and the 
department, I’d like to offer condolences on 
the death of your friend.” 

“But I don’t think he really was my 
friend anymore,” I started to say, before 
being brought up short by the awkward 
realization that the Metropolitan Police had 
no further interest in what had gone on be- 
tween me and Paul. As if reading my mind, 
the cop then said, “You’re probably wonder- 


«gSS " 


ing why we came to you to identify Mr. 
Stead.” I admitted I was; for that matter, 
how had they even known I’d had any con- 
nection with him? 

“When we found him, he had nothing 
at all in his pockets. Possibly he was the 
victim of a robbery, though we’re more in- 
clined to attribute it to a gang of hooligans 
that’s been preying upon the homosexual 
boys who like to use the walkway through 
Holland Park. Unfortunately, that sort of 
thing’s been happening quite often around 
here. 

“We were at a loss for how we might 
identify him, until we found this bit of a let- 
ter in his his inside jacket pocket.” He 
handed me the note I’d sent Paul, still in its 
envelope. Even though I knew what it was, 
I found myself absent-mindedly unfolding 
the piece of paper to read it again. It looked 
as though had been read a lot of times. 

I startled myself with what came next. 
For a moment, I was Paul, or Paul as I’d 
imagined him. I looked at the poem, and it 
sounded just as ridiculous as I’d thought it 
would. I laughed out loud, crumpled the 
piece of paper into a ball, ai>d tossed it on 
the floor. It must have bothered the police, 
because I imagine they were planning on 
using it for evidence or something, but none 
of them said anything. The cop picked it up 
and started smoothing it back out. 

“It’s funny that he’d keep carrying that 
note around with him, isn’t it?” he said. He 
sounded like a person, not a cop. 

“Yeah, real funny,” I answered absently. 
“He’s probably getting a good laugh out of it 
right now, the bastard.” I walked out of the 
police station into the sullen light of a late 
winter morning, came home and started 
packing. Forty-eight hours later I was star- 
ing out this window in the mountains of 
Northern California, watching the snow re- 
lentlessly walling me away from a world that 
I’d just as soon not face for a while. The CD 
player is still set on repeat, and once again 
the quiet is gently stirred by the stark tin- 
kling notes of “The Eternal.” 



l 



PORN 

BY LEAH RYAN 


I had a big room with shiny hard- 
wood floors. It was nice. Great big closets. 
It stayed clean. I shared it with this girl 
Melanie. We were freshmen, so we had to 
share. Or. should I say, we were 
freshwomen. Melanie was from Illinois, a 
suburb outside of Chicago. She was quiet. 
She was considering a government major. I 
think she might have been a virgin. Of 
course, I don’t know that for sure. It’s just 
a guess. 

A week before the Porn thing hap- 
pened, I was on the phone with Jim in that 
room, at two in the morning. Meanwhile, 
Melanie slept. The sleep of the just, I sup- 
pose. She might have been faking, but I 
doubt if she could be that good at it. 

Jim was kind of my boyfriend at 
the time, except that he was screwing an- 
other woman. In fact, I think he was screw- 
ing another woman right then, while he was 
talking to me. I don’t mean that he was lit- 
erally screwing her at that precise moment. 
You know what I mean. I could tell some- 
body was there. Our conversation was full 
of weird pauses. A few times I heard a 
muffley, crackly sound - his hand covering 
the mouthpiece. His hand, which only mo- 
ments before had been god knows where. 
For some reason, I chose not to address 
any of that right away. 

“I hate it here,” I told him, snivel- 
ing and choking. 

‘Right,” he said. “You’ve been there 
a whole month, and you hate it already.” 

“Yeah. It’s a nice place to visit. But 
living here sucks.” I blew my nose on a 
flimsy square of toilet paper. 

“Look, what do you want me to do? 
You want me to drive out there and get you? 
Is that what you want? Huh?” 

“I guess that’s a rhetorical ques- 
tion,” I mumbled stuffily. 

“Look,” said Jim. He didn’t know 
what I meant by rhetorical. I didn’t know 
whether to laugh at him or kick myself for 
saying it in the first place. 

“This was your idea,” he went on. 
“You wanted to go to this hoity-toity school. 
Nobody forced you. You could have stayed 
here and gone to Elmira State or some- 
thing. You didn’t want to. Now you’ve got 
all your goddamn scholarships and 
everything you’ve been bending my ear 
about for the past year and a half. And you 
hate it,” 


“Oh, fuck you,” I said. 

“I don’t know what you want me 
to do,” he said, for what seemed like the 
millionth time. 

“You could start by telling me 
who’s in bed with you,” I suggested 

“What?” He didn’t say it like he 
was shocked. He said it like he hadn’t heard 
me right. 

“It’s that Karen Lambert, isn’t it....” 

“No ” 

“She’s boffed every guy in 
Chemung County, you asshole. She’s had 
her very first orgasm with every...” Melanie 
stirred. 

“I’m not sleeping with Karen,” he 
told me. There was an awkward pause. He 
didn’t deny that he was sleeping with some- 
body, which, by some people’s standards, 
is as good as a confession. 

“You slime,” I said. 

“You hate my guts now I guess.” 

“That’s a rhetorical question.” 

“What?” 

“Never mind,” I sighed, as conde- 
scendingly as I could. “Goodbye.” I hung 
up the phone. I wasn’t crying anymore. I 
was mad. People didn’t do tHis kind of thing 
to me. At least, they never had before. I sat 
there for a while, fuming, with my hand 
glued to the receiver. . 

No way I was going to sleep, so I 
went out walking. The campus was quiet 
as a morgue. Light blue security cars 
passed me, slowed, and rolled their 
windows down. 

“Everything alright?” They asked 
over and over. 

“Fine,” I replied every time, smil- 
ing hard. What if everything wasn’t okay, I 
wondered. What services might they pro- 
vide? I stared getting sleepy when it started 
getting light. The kitchen help began to 
show up, sleepily entering the back doors 
of residence halls, carrying plastic travel 
coffee cups. I heard tires grinding and car 
doors slamming. I heard radios turning on 
in the lit-up kitchens, news and 
rock’and’roll. I wanted to tap on one of 
those bright windows, to creep in one of 
those kitchen doors. But I didn’t know any- 
one here. I was a student. They worked for 
me. 


Back in my room, I slept for two 
hours, which may have been worse than 
no sleep at all. Dutifully, I dragged myself 
to Econ 110, needing a shower, not giving 
a damn, falling asleep, spelling even the 
simplest words wrong. Everything was dull. 

I slept through lunch, skipped my English 
class, woke up starving at three. It went on 
like that for several days. I was just starting 
to get back on schedule when the porn thing 
happened. 

It started with a headline on the 
front page of the school newspaper. It said: 
PLAYMATE MAGAZINE RECRUITS MOD- 
ELS FROM WOMEN’S COLLEGES: 
Outrages Students Stage Protest 

Strangely panicked, I skimmed the 
corresponding article. I caught a line about 
how badly the college’s reputation would 
be if a student from our school were to pose 
for Playmate. “A woman with playmate in 
her house,” one student activist declared, 
“...is like an African-American with KKK lit- 
erature on their coffee table”. That was 
enough for me. The article said other things 
too, but I have no idea what. 

When I got back to my room, 
Melanie was there, chattering away with 
one of her friends; a tiny, squeaky thing 
whose name always escaped me. I always 
wanted to call her “Squeaky” and had to 
stop myself. It was Friday, and the debate 
society was preparing a big weekend. We 
were expecting a busload of boys from 
Haavad or Daatmath or some such place. 

“Melanie,” I began slowly, “I’m go- 
ing away for a few days. If I have any calls, 
I’ll be back Sunday. Monday morning at 
the latest.” I was throwing clothes into a 
plastic shopping bag. I was out of my mind. 

“Where are you going,” Melanie 
asked innocently, 

“New York,” I said. 

“Oh, for the protest?” Melanie’s 
eyes brightened. 

“No,” I said. “For an interview.” 
You’d have to have been there to 
know what an impact this had. First, there 
was the statement, which speaks for itself. 
Then, there is the source. While I am not 
bad looking, I am not centerfold material. 
In order to take my application seriously, 
the Playmate execs would have to squint 
and use their imaginations. It would be my 
guess that they would not choose to do so. 


A 



Melanie and Squeaky stared at me 
is disbelief while I threw a few final items 
into my bag; hairbrush, checkbook, paper- 
back novel. I took a deep breath, said 
goodbye cheerily and walked out of the 
room. I’m sure they wanted to say 
something, but undoubtedly, they were at 
a loss. All the better for me, because I was 
in too much of a hurry to stop and talk. 

The bus station was only a few 
blocks from campus. I walked with fierce 
determination, my ridiculous bag swinging 
at my side. When I arrived, I found that 
the next bus to New York would leave in an 
hour. 

The wait didn’t bother me. Espe- 
cially since I had no real intention of going 
to a Playmate interview. I examined all the 
schedules which hung above the ticket 
counter. The bus to Elmira went a round- 
about way. Not. enough people wanted to 
go straight to Elmira. I couldn’t really blame 
them, but it made me feel small all the 
same. 

I didn’t buy a ticket. I bought a 
Pepsi and a bag of Fritos. I sat in a chair 
with a TV attached to it. I saw an ad for a 
cop show. I was instructed to tune in 
Wednesday if I wanted to see what would 
happen when the lovely daughter of a pow- 
erful ( yet charitable) oil baron and art col- 
lector was abducted by underworld thugs. 
They showed her for a minute: tied up, 
black eye. Would the swarthy, streetwise 
undercover agent arrive in time to save her 
from being raped repeatedly and beaten to 
death with blunt instruments? Would she 
sob wildly in his arms after the whole 
horrible ordeal was over? After the 
commercial, after she had presumably had 
a good night’s sleep and been to the 
hairdresser, would he ask her for a date? 

I walked away with the television 
still going. 

When I was little, we lived in Phoe- 
nix. We had an apartment right near the 
university. My dad was a teacher. He fell in 
love with one of his students and took off. 
Typical story, right? He got a job offer in 
Santa Cruz. For a while I thought this 
meant we were moving to California. I was 
about seven. 

Anyway, with him all the way out 
in California and none too cooperative (he 
drank) it was a while before my mom could 
get things like child support straightened 
out. In that first year or so, we didn’t see a 
penny of his money. We were on Welfare 
for a while, but my mother didn’t like having 
to choose between clothes for me and heat. 
So she got a job. 

It was a night job. I slept half the 
night at my Aunt Barbara’s. She was my 
father’s sister. My mother would come home 
at two or three in the morning and take me 
home. I always woke up when I heard her 
car in the parking lot, but I pretended to 
be asleep until she came and shook me. 
Who knows why. 

Barbara and her husband Fred 
lived in one of those townhouse complexes. 
He worked second shift (three to eleven at 


night) so I rarely saw him. I slept on the 
living room couch. I don’t know why we 
didn’t just move in with them; the 
arrangement seemed kind of weird. But 
the way we did it, Mom and I had mornings, 
afternoon, and evenings together at our 
place. Not bad for a single working mother, 
really. I saw her a lot. She went to bed in 
the mornings after I went to school. 

I heard the door open one night, 
around the time that my mom usually came 
in. As usual, I pretended to be sleeping. 
Then I heard time strange noise; breathing 
and mumbling and things. I opened one eye. 
It was Fred. He was drunk, swaying in front 
of the coffee table. I just closed my eye again 
and didn’t move. Why knows why. He 
picked up the edge of my blanket and tore 
the whole thing off me. That was when my 
mother came in. He was standing there with 
the blanket in his hand. 

What the hell do you think you’re 
doing, I heard her say. Then Fred started 
to sing. 

He still couldn’t stand up very well. 
He had to steady himself on the arm of the 
couch. But he danced and sang and threw 
the blanket over his shoulder. He kicked 
off his shoe; it landed near my mother’s feet. 
He started laughing, unbuttoning his shirt, 
stumbling all over himself. My mother came 
toward me. Fred was swinging his shirt 
around over his head. Mom grabbed me and 
I held her tight around the neck. On our 
way out, we left the front door wide open. 
From the parking lot, I heard Aunt Barbara 
yelling and I heard something crash against 
the floor; a lamp, maybe. 

Within ten days we had packed up 
the car and moved to Elmira, where my 
mother’s folks live. She’d saved enough 
money that she could rent us an apartment. 
She got a clerical job at an insurance com- 
pany. It barely supported us. My grand- 
parents watched me in the afternoons until 
I was old enough to stay home alone. 

I don’t know how long it took me 
to put all the pieces together and make 
sense of it all. My mother was a dancer; a 
stripper. Fred had brought all his buddies 
from the factory over to see the show. 

One time I almost killed a boy- 
friend of mine when I found out he’d been 
to a strip club. I was drunk. I broke a bottle 
over his head. I would have ground the 
broken end into his face if the bartender 
hadn’t stopped me. That’s kind of how it is. 

I go along not thinking about it. And then 
something sets me off. 

I paced the bus station. They were 
announcing busses to all kinds of placed. I 
took my shopping bag into the ladies’ room 
and locked myself into a stall. 

All she wanted to do was take care 
of us. She wanted to be able to move us 
back home. She wanted to be able to take 
me to the doctor if I was sick. She wanted 
to be with me as much as possible. 

So how come I told those girls I 
was going to a Playmate interview? I don’t 
know, maybe I wanted to make it real to 
them. Porn isn’t a faraway thing that 


happens to other people. Don’t they know 
that their boys from Haavad and Daatmath 
go to strip bars? What’s worse, buying or 
selling? I would like to ask them that. I 
would like to see what they would say. I’ll 
bet a lot of their dads have money tied up 
in porn, too. It pays their tuition. It buys 
their party dresses. 

Sitting in the stall, I realized that 
I didn’t know how I was going to go back to 
school. Those squeaky girls, the girls I made 
fun of, honestly they scared me to death. 

I thought about calling my mother 
and telling her I was coming home for the 
weekend. Or for good. I didn’t know which 
it would be. How could I explain? 

I thought about getting a shotgun 
and going home to the bar where Jim liked 
to go after work. I thought about pointing 
it at his head and telling him to dance. Take 
it all off baby. I thought about stuffing 
money in his underwear and blowing his 
head off. I thought about how no matter 
what I did, he would never be as humiliated 
as my mother was that night in Phoenix, 
with Fred and all his buddies watching her 
tassels spin, tossing nickels and dimes at 
her navel. 

I thought about picking up some 
guy in the bus station and taking him some- 
where. Making him beg. They get so weak 
and desperate, just like little boys. They get 
tears in their eyes, sometimes. 

I heard the bathroom door swing 
open. A couple of girls came in. They were 
from the college. I watched their feet and 
listened to them. They were going to 
Princeton for the weekend, one of them had 
a car but it was in the shop. One peed in 
the stall next to mine, while the other 
talked to her through the door. 

“So do you think you want to pose 
for Playmate?" the outside girl asked. I 
heard the girl in the stall next to me giggle, 
over the sound of the flushing toilet. 

“Yeah, right,” she said. 

“Would you do it for a million 
bucks?” asked the first girl. The second girl 
got herself together and emerged from the 
stall. The door slammed back. 

“Right,” she said. “What do you 

think?” 

No, I thought. You’ll do it for some 
guy in a nice Italian suit. You’ll do it on 
your honeymoon in Switzerland or wher- 
ever. You’ll take off your traveling suit and 
dance around in your silk lingerie. Think 
of all the shopping you’ll do with all those 
credit cards, your new name embossed in 
gold. Or maybe you’ll be kidnapped by 
thugs and rescued by some lusty hero from 
TV. 

Me, I’d do it for money and glam- 
our, too. But mostly I do it for power. I like 
to watch them crawl. It only lasts a minute, 
but it’s power all the same, 

“Never,” said one of them, while 
they scrubbed their hands in the sink. I 
blacked out my eyes with the heels of my 
hands. I pretended to be asleep. 



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©Articles 


The 


The authors of the Constitution, in an 
idealistic moment, spelt out the basic freedoms 
of the American people in the Bill of Rights. The 
problem was that it wasn’t actually a list granted 
to the American people; if you were poor, a 
woman, or a member of a racial or religious 
minority, the Bill of Rights was basically inter- 
preted to ignore you. The same standard applied 
to children for the vast majority of America’s 
history. Well, it’s no longer true. In theory, if not 
in practice, the Bill of Rights now holds for everyone. 
Constitutional rights no longer end at the schoolhouse 
door. Education is power; knowing these rights could 
make school a lot more fun. 

First off, a few words of warning: this is not 
intended to be a definitive guide to what you can get 
away with at school. The basis for the majority of this 
article was a 1988 American Civil Liberties Union 
book called The Rights of Students , by Janet R. Price, 
Alan H. Levine, and Eve Cary. The information briefly 
summarized here is six years old, laws always differ 
from state to state, and the possibility always exists 
that I made an error in interpreting what the book had 
to say. If you think you have a decent case to argue, 
pick up your own copy of the book or call your local 
ACLU office. The ACLU is devoted to fighting cases 
like this, and they’ll let you know what’s going on. 

And now, the good stuff... 

The First Amendment 
applies to teenagers in school. 
Your teachers may do or say 
things to the contrary, but 
it’s a fact. In Tinker v. Des 
Moines, the Supreme Court ruled that students have the 
right to express opinions on any subject unless their 
action “materially and substantially disrupts work and 
discipline.” This applies even if the action is likely to 
cause others to be disruptive. Touching off a riot would 
probably be construed as a material disruption; making 
the football team mad would probably not. Obscenity or 
nudity would probably fall within the principal’s juris- 
diction, so odds are that your “N azi Punks Fuck Off’ shirt 
isn’t a go. 

Your principal cannot tell you to take off your 







abortion rights button or whatever without violating your 
Constitutional rights. Period. If you are wearing, doing, 
or saying something that contains a message of some sort 
and isn’t breaking the rules or causing people to run 
screaming from the room or such things, the school 
officials can’t legally do anything about it. 


THEY WHO 
ARE NOT 
AS OTHERS 


Personal appearance is a 
separate issue; the First 
Amendment may or may 
not apply to liberty spikes. 
If you ’ ve been barred from Any town High until the green 
washes out of your hair, your rights are slightly more 
enigmatic and the rules vary from state to state. There 
were several long lists of states with specific regulations 
in the book, but 

they’re probably outdated. If you’re serious about it, give 
the closest ACLU office a call. If you can make it into a 
free speech issue, like your teacher taking away your 
nifty “Dead Men Don’t Rape” jacket, you’ll be on firmer 
ground. 

! Again, barring material disrup- 
tion of school activities, publication 
and distribution of your zine (the 
ACLU persists in using the phrase 
“underground newspaper”) is a pro- 
tected First Amendment activity. If the Anytown High 
school newspaper or literary magazine sells copies, you 
are 

allowed to sell your zine, too. (The right to actually sell 
your zine instead of just giving it away, regardless of 
school-sponsored publications being sold, was upheld in 
Scoville v. Board of Education of Joliet Township, but I 
don’t want to mislead anyone. If you get hassled, call the 



ACLU.) 

Unfortunately, your principal does have the right 
to see your zine before you sell it. However, there must 
be specific rules in place regarding how to get it ap- 
proved. Indecencies or vulgar language are sufficient 
reason for a ban. Who knows? Your zine might not have 
any profanity. 

Finally, The Rights of Students urges you to 
avoid libel. This is probably a good idea. If you call 
members of the Anytown High faculty a bunch of white 
supremacists who get off on sexually harassing members 
of the student body, you don’t have any proof, and 
someone shows it to the principal, you’re probably 
reached the point where the ACLU can’t help you any- 
more. Lawsuits are not fun. 


DOW! 

Yom. 

PERMANENT 

RECORD! 


Guess what? If you’re over 
1 8 and go to a public school, 
you have the right to look at 
the mythical permanent 
record. If you’re not over 
18, your parents do. It’s 
called the Buckley amend- 
ment, and it’ s probably your best chance to find out what 
kind of lies and innuendo get recorded there. Ask some- 
one important at your school about it. You may have to 
file a request in writing. 


THE ANYTOWN 
ANARCHIST FRONT 


i 


Student groups 
may be formed 
“absent a threat 
to the orderly 
operation of the school.” Go wild with this one. The best 
bit is that any privileges granted to one group must 
legally be granted to any group (under the same condi- 
tions; you don’t get to skip the paperwork). If the French 
Club gets to use the loudspeaker, the Nihilism League 
can get to use the loudspeaker. If the environmental 
group gets to bring in speakers, you can bring in your 
own speakers. The possibilities are well-nigh endless. 


The ACLU book offers 
the handy suggestion 
that if you don’t want 
the school to get their 
hands on something, 
you shouldn’t put it in 
your desk or locker. That’s wise advice; 
lockers and desks are probably considered school prop- 
erty, and as such the school can search it for no good 
reason whatsoever. Leaving something incriminating in 
your locker is a really dumb way to tempt fate. 

As far as personal searches go, at a minimum, 
school officials “must have good reason to think evi- 
dence of wrongdoing will be found... [and] the search 
must not be more intrusive than necessary to find the 
specific thing the school official expects to find.” That’s 
pretty clear. 

If the police get involved, they’ll be operating 
under the same Fourth Amendment restrictions on you as 
on anyone 

else: probable cause, search warrants, etc. Giving the 
police permission to search you removes these restric- 
tions, and therefore may not be a good idea depending on 
the situation. You make the call. 

In Goss v. Lopez, the Su- 
preme Court held that seri- 
ous disciplinary action re- 
quired a minimum amount 
of due process. If you’re getting your bus transportation 
cut off, suspended, expelled, or something equally seri- 
ous, you have the right to an adequate notice of charges 
and a hearing in front of an impartial figure. “Impartial 
figure” probably means school board, unless someone 
on the board was directly involved. You should probably 
contact a lawyer if you want to fight; she or he can tell you 
what other rules apply and whether or not you’ll be 
permitted to have a lawyer representing you at the 
hearing. 




Odds are that you won’t be told these things by your friendly faculty. A fully informed student body 
probably would strike terror into the hearts of administrators everywhere. Don’t expect to make a lot of 
friends in administration by utilizing the First Amendment. These are, however, your rights. Rights are not 
privileges; they cannot be taken away as punishment and doled out as favors. Using these rights is as 
American as apple pie. Make sure you tell your teachers that as you hand them your plans for the Nihilism 
League field trip. 


m. 



EUOKtYEAH! 


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So you don’t want to spend thirty of your hard earned dollars on NOFX skater shorts. Your band just paid someone else three 
bucks to screen each shirt (Ouch). Well, I think it is time to learn to silk screen. There aren’t that many supplies involved and any punk 
with half a brain can do it. First thing is first and you need an environment to work in. This doesn’t mean the corner of your room between 
stacks of records. You have to have somewhere dark to prepare the screen. This means you need an empty closet or a bathroom that 
you can block the window or something to that affect. You also need a big sink or bathtub and a good powerful spray of water to match. 

I find the best is one of those sinks with the spray things built in. Lastly, you need to have a big table or something equivalent to screen 
on. If you donlt have any of these resources available find someone who does and maybe everyone can screen at one place. 

Alright you have the space and next you need supplies. It definitely isn’t a bad thing to pick up a kit. Speedball makes one 
and contains a little of everything: screen, frame, emulsion, sensitizer, drawing fluid, screen filler, ink and a squeegee. This may sound 
like a lot of stuff but it really isn’t. Some other useful items to have in the area are towels, masking tape, bleach, some black cardboard, 
a big piece of glass, 150W light bulb, gooseneck lamp and an iron. Since l can’t go over every detail involving screening I will add to 
what the instructions of any kit have to say. 

There are a few different ways to prepare your screen and by far the photo emulsion method is the best. First off get a photo 
transparency of your artwork. This can involve going to the copy shop or just draw right on some transparency sheets. After cleaning 
the screen with some household detergent you have to let it dry top up (recessed side). The best way to do this is use a milk crate and 
tape some pennies in each comer that way only the wood frame touches the crate, not the screen. Alright the screen is dry and you want 
to coat it. Mix the photo emulsion to the sensitizer in a cup or something in a 4: 1 ratio. I found that about two spoons of emulsion to 
one half spoon of sensitizer is enough for one 10"X14" screen. You can mix the two in dim light but you only have a couple minutes 
so work fast. Use your squeegee and apply the mixture and one side of the screen. Keep flipping the screen over and over till you cover 
the whole thing with a thin coat (the thinner the better). One important thing is to make sure you squeegee the top side last. Now put 
the thing in your dark area for around an hour or so to dry. A fan can help a lot but make sure it isn’t too dusty. 

After the screen has dried you are ready to burn the screen. This part is a little tricky to explain but here goes. Look at the frame 
to make sure you know what top (recessed side) and bottom (flat side) are. Cover the top side (recessed side) with black cardboard. Now 
flip it over and put your transparency backwards on bottom side (which is now face up) and place the glass on top of the whole thing. 
I use a 1 50 Watt bulb, because it is cheaper than afloodlight, so these burning times are for that. You may have to try a few times depending 
on how thin you coat your screen.’ With your light about a foot above the screen let the screen bum for about 35-45 minutes for a 10”X14" 
screen. After the time allotted it is time to wash out the screen. 

Use luke warm water, not hot and soak each side of the screen. Then use your strong stream of water to wash out the areas where 
your design are. This may take some time so don’t be too worried if your image isn’t coming out right away. If after continual washing 
you are only getting half an image then you let your screen bum too long. If you get a lot of spots washing out you need to increase your 
time. If there are some small spots which didn’t wash out try using a cotton swab and under water mb the screen. If you have spots that 
washed out which you don’t want then use the screen filler and paint over them with a brash. Now just let your screen dry bottom down 
on your milkcrate. 

Now the screen is dry and you can do some tests prints on newspaper. Pour a bead of textile ink across one end of the top of 
your screen. I once again use my milk crate for a stand when I am doing this, you may want to buy some of the hinges they sell to make 
a station but it isn’t necessary. Using your squeegee pull the ink from one end to the other while on the milk crate. This loads your screen 
with ink. Now you can put the screen on the paper and draw the squeegee back the other way. Lift up the screen carefully and hopefully 
you will have a nice print. This takes some practice so don’t try shirts until you have the hang of it. Make sure you don’t wait more than 
a minute or two between prints because the whole thing will dry up. After you are down make sure that you clean all of your utensils 
well with luke warm water and return unused ink to its container. 

Hopefully you now have the confidence to screen and a few helpful hints along the way. If you want to buy the stuff separate 
or don’t have a detailed booklet on each step write me and send a buck and some stamps and I will send you out a copied version of mine. 
It also includes how you do multi colored screening. Good Luck! screen printing can be a lot of fun. 

Eric, Punkity Rockity Records-PO Box 6014, E. Lansing, MI 48826 

* 




OFFSPRING TOTAL CHAOS 






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■ ■ >: • ■ . ■ : 

This month’s record reviews will begin the end of the “BANNED” remarks due to the negative response it recieved and 
the fact that we couldn’t really tell what had and hadn’t been “banned” in the first place. Also: three records seem to have 
gotten lost in the mail between my house and the reviewers. I am very sorry and deeply apologize to what ever band sent 
them, sorry! Anyways, on with the growing list of reviewers who are: Eric Action (EA), Matt Berland (MB), Darren Cahr 
(DC), Steve Cook (SC), Will Dandy (WD), Jon Entropy (JE), Karen Fisher (KF2), Kristen Francis (KF), Dave Larson (DL), 
David Selevan (DS2), Dan Sinker (DS), Bret Van Horn (BVH), and Sean Wipfli (SW) 


Action Patrol-Up and Running, 7" 

Okay, so let’s talk about all the rad things about this 7". The 
packaging is outrageous, with the hand-screened manilla envelope 
covers and the die-cut lyric sheet (which matches the cover art, too). 
And the music inside...? Fucking cool melodic punk/hardcore. The 
opener, “Tube,” starts out sounding like it’s gonna be a J-Church/ 
Cringer rip-off, only to explode into a punk rock scorcher sounding 
kinda like Portland’s Punky Rockit. The last song out of four, 
“Clock,” has a cool syncopation and vocals kinda like the Crucifucks 
at times. Sound cool? These are just two examples... you have to buy 
it to hear the rest. Man, this guy can scream... (BVH) 

(Buddy System Records: P.O. Box 49514 Austin, TX 78765) 

Amebix-The Power Remains, LP 
Well, all the punx down at Profane Existance are in love with this 
band and I can see why. This is like death on vinyl, and it’s pretty 
damn scary. It has that deathy-dark-slow hardcore sound to it, 
reminding me of slow Venom in many aspects but with less metal 
influencing. The live side sounds similar but a little faster(probably 
due to it being recorded 2 years after the studio side). It is that classic 
stop/start hardcore like Prophets of Rage mixed with the darker more 
deathy venom-ish stuff. It also comes with a fukin great poster to 
scare yer friends into thinking you worship satan. (JE) 

(Skuld Records; Maybachstr. 7; 70839 Gerlingen, Germany) 

Anarcrust-Coalescence, LP 

Ho boylMore German grindcore..the German punk bands are 
definately some of the heaviest i’ve ever heard, and this just helps 
prove that point. Fast and heavy grindcore the way it was meant to be 
by crusty punx on ultra-delicious flourscent orange vinyl. I’ddefinately 
pick this up if you can handle a full LP of grindcore without going on 
a killing rampage. Another winner for Skuld. This is mostly pretty 
damn fast with barking type vocals a la Luzifers Mob. (JE) 

(Skuld Records; Maybachstr. 7; 70839 Gerlingen, Germany) 

Aus-Rotten/Naked Aggression-split 7” 

Aus Rotten continues to amaze me with thier ultra-simple, ultra-cool 
hardcore. The dual vocals are probably the best part of their sound. 
Naked Aggression has always kinda annoyed me, but no longer they 
have two nice fairly poppy songs, but they seem to have lost a lot of 
their political edge. Is that what being in an earthquake does to you? 
Oh well, both bands do two awesome songs, and I still can’t find the 
“R” in Aus Rotten’s logo. (WD) 

(Aus-Rotten PO BOX 7 1287; Pittsburgh, PA 15213. Naked Aggres- 
sion; Po Box 8044; Northridge, CA 91327) 


Bell Jar -s/t, 7” 

Bell Jar is the find of the month for me! This record is absolutly 
fantastic. Slow, melodic, haunting melodies. This sounds somewhat 
like what would happen if SLANT 6 and TEAM DRESCH joined 
forces, only with more reverb. This is a really good record. I only 
wish there was a lyric sheet. (DS) 

(eMpTy records PO Box 12034 Seattle, WA 98102) 

Big Sniff-We’re Only in It for the $, 7" 

A loud clangy musical intro leads into the first song, “Devil on My 
Shoulder,” which is a very fast tempo song about partying too hard. 
Three more songs with more of the same. The lyrics are pretty 
simple-minded (they say “fuck” a lot) and the songs a little formulaic. 
I want to say “in your face” and I really don’t think they would take 
it as an insult. I can see Beavis & Butthead liking it. The artwork 
consists of cartoon space aliens, drunk and passed-out in an alley 
surrounded by empty malt liquor cans. This sort of says it all, I think. 
(KF2) 

(Mint Tone, 84-29 153d St., Apt. LCD, Howard Beach, CA 1 1414) 

Blindfold - “Restrain The Thought” CD 
13 songs here, all in that post-hardcore/emo vein. Some of this 
reminds me a bit of the last Turning Point stuff, at other times it 
makes me think of Lifetime. Blindfold are from Belgium, but this CD 
is far better than most European hardcore. The singer has a pretty 
good grasp of English and doesn’t sound out of place. Maybe this 
European stuff is just in general getting better because it seems like 
most of the recent stuff I’ve heard has been quite good. This one is 
no exception, and you can get it at U.S. prices too. (DL) 

(Conquer The World P.O. BOX 40282 Redford, MI 48240) 

Bollweevils-Stick Your Neck Out!, LP 
These guys are great. Real fun sounding pop-punk in the vein of 
Screeching Weasel. They’re from Chicago too so maybe it’s 
something in the air or water there, but they rule. Fast, snotty, poppy 
and cool! (WD) 

(Dr. Strange Records; Po Box 7000-177; Alta Loma, CA 91701) 
Bored to Death-s/t, 7” 

Real sloppy mid-tempo punk with a female singer. Sorta like F. Y.P. 
with a female singer. No matter how you describe it it’s really cool 
and goofy. (WD) 

($3, Recess Records; Po Box 1 1 12; Torrance, CA 90505) 

Boris the Sprinkler-Grilled Cheese b/w Bad Guy Reaction 
“Grilled Cheese” is a perfect tune done in the grand BTS fashion- 





catchy, fun, melodic, and instantly memorable... And they manage 
to stick to the punk side of pop-punk, unlike a lot of lesser bands out 
there. B-side is a good Rezillos cover, and though another original 
would have been better, this is still one of my favorite new 7”s! (SW) 
($3; Bulge Rec’s; PO Box 1 173; Green Bay, WI 54305) 

Bracket-bs., 7” 

What would happen if you mixed the Fat Wreck Chords sound with 
Green Day? Bracket! Very happy poppy sound. Really good, but it 
sounds like they use an echo pedal on the vocals which sounds 
annoying. The cover makes fun of Pearl Jam too. If you like the pop- 
punk sound than this is for you, although I think they’ve signed to a 
major label now... (WD) 

(Fat Wreck Chords; Box 460144; San Francisco, CA 94146) 
Buzzov.en-Sore, CD Only 

Although the four minute sample in the begining is annoying the rest 
of this album is really cool. Buzzov.en continue to drone on and on 
and sound like a cow dying. It’s incredibly slow, sludgy, and 
powerful. A real winner for fans of the Melvins and similiar bands. 
(WD) 

(Roadrunner Records; 536 Broadway; New York, NY 10012) 

The Candy Snatchers/Gimcrack-split 7” 

This is straightforward three-chord punk rock. Pretty ‘77 with sort 
of a garage feel to it. GimCrack leans much more towards ‘77, and 
The Candy Snatchers lean much more towards the garage side. Both 
bands are really good, and go great together. Cool team up! (WD) 
(Stiff Pole Records; Po Box 20721; St Pete, Florida 33742) 

Corduroy-Now Hwat, 7" 

This is one of those hard to explain poppy bands. They’re really 
good, and they have a really unique sound. It’s almost like pop punk 
with a hard folk edge. It sounds weird, but it has to be heard to be 
believed. This is a keeper. (M.B.) 

(Broken Rekids; P.O. Box 460402; S.F., CA 94146-0402) 

Daltonic-Phantom music and Voices, 7" 

The first of the 3 songs on this 7" starts off pretty weak, like it’s trying 
to be that “new school” H.C. sound, but then the chorus kicks in and 
the old school influence becomes apparent. I could imagine getting 
this record back in ’ 89 and loving it. Miss those old youth crew back- 
up vocals? Well here they are! I would put this stuff on a tape with 
Side By Side, Walk Proud, and Unit Pride for those days when I feel 
like wearing cut off camo shorts and reminiscing about “Those days, 
those fucking days”. Bonus points are given for the Misfits skull on 
the side 2 label. (DL) 

(Vigilance Records P.O. BOX 44169 Tucson, AZ 85733) 
Dezerter-7" 

Yes, the same Dezerter back from ten years ago. If you heard the 
MRR LP with them be prepared for something a little different. This 
time they have afemale singer and the music seems more thought out. 
This record will make you jump around your room and try to sing 
along but you can’t cause it is all Polish. Unfortunately my copy has 


no translations and that is really upsetting. The world doesn’t revolve 
around the English language I guess. (EA) 

(Nikt Nic Nie Wie, P.O. Box 224, 41-900 Bytom, Poland) 

Dogs On Ice-Salt Wound, LP 

This is a really great pop-punk 3 peice band that has a lot of engergy. 
It sort of reminds me of a mix between Jawbreaker, Face to Face, and 
the early Decendents. It is really melodic and catchy, which makes 
you want to listen to this CD often. Definately one of the better recent 
releases. (DS2) 

(Allied Records PO BOX 460683 San Francisco CA 94146) 

Dogpound-Junkyard, 7" 

The musicianship is okay but the singer seems to be trying too hard. 
All I can think is that they are from New Jersey; perhaps Bon Jovi’s 
influence was too largely felt. I can tell he’s into some heavy duty 
posturing and I can’t even see him. Is that unfair? I hate giving a 
totally bad review so I will say the last song of four, “So Be It” is the 
most listenable, an anthemic speedy thrashy kind of thing normally 
up my alley. But they placed it last on the bill and by that time nothing 
could save them from my cold, heartless keyboard. (KF2) 

(Black Pumpkin Records, POB 676, Totowa, NJ 07512) 

Doughnuts-Equalize Nature, CD 

This is an All-female Straight Edge band from Sweden, and y ’know, 
they’re pretty damn good. I know that this is so typically American 
of me but I usually really dislike European Hardcore. I don’t know 
what it is.... maybe if they would sing in their native languages 
instead of English it wouldn’t usually sound so silly. (And we all 
know that Hardcore is NEVER supposed to sound “silly”) This CD, 
however, comes in at the top of the heap. When the singer screams 
instead of sings, she even sounds good to my jaded standards. I like 
it, even if I don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. (DL) 
(Desperate Fight Records, Kemig 16, 90731 Umea, Sweden) 

Down By Law-punkrockacademyfightsong, LP 
The best Epitaph release since NOFX’s “White Trash, etc.” This is 
amazing. It’s not your average Bad Religion sound-alike, either. 
This is melodic hardcore with more of a punk rock punch. The lyrics 
are cool, the music is cool, the CD is amazing. Buy it. (M.B.) 
(Epitaph; 6201 Sunset Blvd. Suite 111 Hollywood Blvd.; Holly- 
wood, CA 90028) 

Driftwood, 7” 

Interesting. Kind of hardcore, kind of “Sister” period Sonic Youth, 
a little neuvo wavo thrown in for good measure, and a vocalist who 
sounds like Paul Westerberg half the time and like a food processor 
when he’s not. Each time I’ve listened to it I’ve liked it more, which 
is always a good sign. They sound like a band with a bunch of pretty 
interesting ideas, which is rare enough these days to warrant a 
mention. Add to that the fact that they’re actually willing to write a 
halfway decent song (though at this point they’re not as good as I’m 
guessing that they ’ 11 get) and you get a band worth checking out. Hell, 
they have one song (called “Flicker”) which I’m find myself hum- 
ming, a distubing thought once you listen to the song. And you 




should. (DC) 

(Monopoly Records, 4954 Read Rd., Moorpark, CA 93021) 


Drunk in Public/Freedom of Few-split 7” 

Drunk in Public is a very fast, pop-punk band. They sound like a 
cross between double-time Screeching Weasel and No Use For A 
Name. Freedom of Few does two live songs that sound like a mix of 
the Misfits and Fugazi. The Vocals are very early Glenn Danzig like 
and there is a lot of muting and Fugazi stuff instrumentaly. Pretty 
cool release. (WD) 

(Wet and Reckless Records; Po Box 655; Lompoc, CA 93438) 

The Dummies-Rock Attack USA, 7" 

Punk rock with a heavy low-fi beer-drinkin’, fast drivin’, rock and 
roll influence. A-side, “Play Loud,’’ steals a classic rock riff and 
sounds musically like a lesser developed Sloppy Seconds song. The 
B-Side is a slower, more angry sounding song, which picks up pace 
at the end. If I didn’t know it was on Empty I would swear it was on 
Estrus. Pretty cool. (BVH) 

(Empty: PO Box 12034 Seattle, WA 98102) 

Everglade, 7” 

...sort of like Helmet or some other AmRep kinda thing except the 
guy screaming at the top of his lungs actually doesn’t pretend that he 
has something to say — which is a sizable improvement. “It wasn’t 
all that dumb!” repeated at length over a lockstep riff is much funnier 
to me than, say, Rosanne. A pretty decent 7”, though one gets the 
impression that they’re much better live. Of course, most of these 
riffmonger bands are better live, which is less a comment on their 
songwriting than a comment on the unrelenting power of heavy riffs 
played at earsplitting volume. And these guys have riffs that will tear 
holes in your intestinal walls, move your pancreas to a place south of 
your pelvis, and generally neuter your yet unborn children. If that 
sound appealing (and hell, I enjoy it) then you should check this out. 
(DC) 

(Mintone, 161-26 Crossbat Blvd., Suite 150, Howard Beach, NY 
11414) 

Exene Cervenka- Wordcore #7, 7” 

This is only the third wordcore seven inch I’ve heard. Out of the three 
I’ve heard, this is definitly the most performance arty. A lot of 
multitracked voices, and cymbals crashing. I dunno. Maybe it takes 
a little more patience than I’ve got. (DS) 

(Kill Rock Stars 120 NE State #418 Olympia, WA 98501) 

Face To Face-Disconnected, 7" 

Really good pop-punk with personal lyrics and catchy songs. These 
sound a lot like their song on the Lookout! comp, that I liked, and it 
also sort of sounds like Sinkhole I think. This isn’t reall my favorite 
kind of music but if you like other Face To Face releases, you wont 
be dissapointed with this one.(DS2) 

(Fat Wreck Chords PO Box 460144 San Francisco CA 94146) 

Face to Face/Horace Pinker-split 7” 

I’ve heard some weird shit about Face to Face recently. About how 
they used to be Glam Metal spandex people and that they got into 
punk rock because they saw it as a way to make money. I don’t know 


if that’s true or not, but I do knwo that they fucking rock! ! ! Face to 
Face is a great pop-punk band that sounds a lot like Rythm Collision. 
They do one original and a cover of the Violent Femmes “Blister in 
the Sun.” Horace Pinker is a melodic band that bares so many 
ressemblences to Samiam that I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that 
it was a side prject of theirs. Overall it’s a great power-pop release. 
(WD) 

(Rhetoric Records; Po Box 82; Madison, WI 53701) 

Fells-Amped, 10” 

GREAT fuzzbomb punk from this Arizona band-this was an unex- 
pected winner! Reminds me of Gaunt with a bit of 60’ s punk 
influence-super fuzzed out guitar sound, maxxed out recording 
levels, and catchy songs... Every song is a winner, and it’s good 
enough to tape for repeat listens while cruising around town. Get 
one! (SW) 

(Westworld; PO Box 43787, Tucson, AZ 85733) 

fiddlehead, “The Deaf Waiter” CD 
Seven songs recorded in Chicago by Steve Albini, mixed in Athens. 
It has a raw tinny sound which could come from the fact that I was 
listening to it on CD, not Albini ’ s medium of choice. Very moody and 
urgent vocals, with that stop/start quiet/loud emo thing. At first it did 
not really grab my attention but I ended up listening to it three times 
in a row before I took it out. Now here I go again making a comment' 
that doesn’t belong in a professional record review: the four boys in 
the band look very young and I think they are all very cute. Sassy , take 
note! (KF2) 

(Allied Recordings, POB 460683, San Francisco, CA 94146) 
Fiendz-Everybody’s Favorite, 7" 

These songs remind me of a not-quite-as-catchy Mr. T Experience. 
The singer can carry the tune and the band is having a lot of fun, but 
the hooks just aren’t forcibly seizing your brain like the very best 
stuff. The songs are pleasantly melodic, so this isn’t a bad release by 
a long shot; it’s just not the creme de la creme. (SC) 

(Black Pumpkin Records, PO Box 676, Totowa NJ 07512) 

Fleas and Lice-Parasites, 7” 

This is a cool, throbbing hard-core band from Holland. Dual vocals 
make it excellent with one guy and one gal. It’s sorta like Discharge, 
but more complex and much cooler. It also coes with a huge insert/ 
poster and patch. All in all this is a great 7”. They also have one of 
the coolest song titles of the year: “Rave is your grave.” (WD) 
(Skuld Records; Maybachstr. 7; 70839 Gerlingen, Germany) 

Floor/Spazz-split 7” 

Floor is a noisy slow sludgy melvins/buzzov.en type bands. While on 
the other side is Spazz an ultra- violent, fast band. this makes up a truly 
interesting and diverse 7”. The only problem I think there might be 
is that some people might listen to only one side. But no matter what; 
it’s awesome. (WD) 

(Bovine, Po Box 2134; Madison, WI 53701) 





fluf-Skyrocket, 7” 

This is a cool looking picture disc that features fluf ’s trademark punk 
rock on it. They’re the bridge between punk and Nirvana (in a good 
way). They’re a noisy “hawd koa rock n roll” band that is just damn 
good. (WD) 

(distributed by Cargo) 

Four Point Star-Stranger’s Ways, 7" 

This 7" immediately reminded me of a bastard cross of J Church, 
Parasites, Corduroy, and a little bit of Fugazi on the second side. At 
times it is extremely melodic, while at others, it’s discordant. 
However, It’s enjoyable the whole way through. It’s the kind of 7" 
that makes you smile. Especially when the “na na na’s” come on. 
(M.B.) 

(Broken Rekids; P.O. Box 460402; S.F., CA 94146-0402) 


Goodwrench-s/t, tape 

This is a cool metally hardcore band from Boston. When I got it I 
popped it in my car and was thrashing the whole drive. They’re a 
pretty typical Boston harcore band, but they’re damn good at it. 
Three songs with a hard-edged stop start feel. Keep up the good work 
guys! (WD) 

(Jesse; 516 Western Ave; Brighton, MA 02135) 

Government Issue-Make an Effort, 7” 

This is a re-issue of the classic for losers like me who were to lame 
to get it the first time (or just really young). This is great influencial 
straight edge hardcore that is required listening for any punk. No 
Way Out and Tenager in a Box are the stand out songs on here. (WD) 
(THD Records; 2020 Seabury Aye; Minneapolis, MN 55406) 


Fuzz-7" . 

Pretty heavy driving punk-rock with pissed off sounding lyrics. 
These guys seem like they have a lot to say but the music bothers me 
a little bit. Worth checking out. (DS2) 

(PO BOX 13546 Tucspn, AZ 85733) 

G.N.P./Jermflux-split 7” 

Both bands are wierd hard-core bands that deserve better recordings. 
G.N.P. is Birmingham, AL’s oldest punk band (about 13 years) and 
still can barely play their instruments and they do a weird cover of the 
Jeopardy theme song. Jermflux is really scarily wierd hard-core with 
a female singer, a Wierd release! (WD) 

($3; Thedford Records; Po Box 21310; Oakland, CA 94620) 

The Geezers-welcome soccer hooligans, 7" 

This album’s purpose is to make fun of all the hype in the world, 
mainly world cup soccer crap, though the lyrics were pretty funny 
(“would you please do us all a favor, overdose on ecstasty if you call 
yourself a raver”) and it was on grey marble vinyl. ..the music did not 
impress me at all. i can’t really think of a nice way to say yuck...so 
i’ll just say yuck. (KF) 

(retain and expel records po box 31264 Chicago, il 60631-0264) 
Good Ridance-gidget, 7" 

Any band that would name their 7" after gidget and have sound bits 
from the show and pictures of her all over the place is cool in my 
book.. .even though the lyric sheet is a little tough to read with her 
picture in the background, i wouldn’t enjoy seeing this band live...i 
know that half of the people there would be there because they like 
the poppy side of good ridance and they would want to enjoy the 
show in peace.. .maybe tap their foot or nod their heads some, the 
other half would be there to see good ridance’ s hardcore side so they 
would be moshing it up and crushing the poppy’s feets and heads, 
you could tell they spent a little too much time trying to make the 
lyrics thoughtful and they ended up clicheing and rhyming all over 
the place (“what you get is what you see until there’s nothing left for 
me”.. .’’the cause has left us leaving nothing but effect”), the music 
was pretty catchy though. (K.F) 

($3; little deputy records po box 7066 austin texas 78713-7066) 


Hellkrusher-Fields of Blood, 7" 

More Skuld crustcore that stays along the lines of Anarcrust and 
Luzifers Mob. This definately kicks ass and is crusty shit-punk like 
only Skuld can release. This is also on cool orange vinyl and contains 
4 songs which are all pretty damn good. You can even understand the 
lyrics. The drums are also really cool and these guys even seem like 
they know how to play their own instruments. Will says they sound 
like Discharge but I think he’s an idiot(not to insult Discharge tho’). 

(JE) 

(Skuld Records; Maybachstr. 7; 70839 Gerlingen, Germany) 
IAbhorHer-s/t, 7" 

This is a Slap-A-Ham release, which basically tells you that I 
probably like it and that it is grindcore. IaborHer are one of the 
heavier bands in the grindcore scene not concentrating on blazing 
speed as much as almost death metal like heaviness with some of the 
coolest drums I’ve ever heard. They have that Septic Death kindof 
sound just about 5 times heavier. This 7" scares Matt, so it must be 
pretty damn good. (JE) 

(Slap-A-Ham; P.O. Box 420843; San Fransisco, CA 94142) 
Iceburn -s/t 7” 

If you are familiar with Iceburn, you know what to expect. If you 
aren’t, you probably won’t like this. Iceburn gets progressively (and 
I mince no words using ‘progressive’ to describe Iceburn) jazzier 
with each recording. I can handle two songs well enough (even 
though one song is an “excerpt of a live show”). At least this isn’t 
another double twelve inch. (DS) 

(Art Monk Construction PO Box 1105 State College, PA 16804- 
1105) 

J Church- Prophylaxis, 12” 

Although I’ve been listening to this record non-stop for two weeks, 
I just noticed that it also comes with a 7” slipped discreetly in the 
packaging. Wow, that makes one MORE reason why YOU MUST 
GO OUT AND BUY THIS RECORD RIGHT NOW! This is an 
absolutly fabulous record, definitly the best J Church release to date. 
The lyrics are even better than your average J Church lyrics (includ- 
ing one song that is too close to home for me). If you haven’t heard 


J Church yet, you have to get this record, I can assure you that you 
won’t be dissappointed. (DS) 

(Broken Rekids PO Box 460402 San Francisco CA 94146-0402) 
Kepone-Ugly Dance, LP 

Musician-quality punk rock with a noisy slant. Like a cross between 
Hedgehog, NoMeansNo, and at times, the Melvins with a lot of hard 
rock’n’roll undertones. The music is very jazzy and intricately 
arranged noise-punk, with perhaps one of the most amazing punk 
rock rythym-sections I’ve heard in a long time (Read: NoMeansNo). 
The matching bass and drum fills on the opening track, “Loud,” must 
be heard to be understood. The vocals have a definitive hard-rock/ 
classic metal sound, which reminded me of my hescher days when I 
was like twelve. Who knows? Maybe I still am a hescher.. .(BVH) 
(Quarter Stick Records: P.O. Box 25342, Chicago, IL 60625) 

Kids Meal/Growing Up Gomez- split 7” 

Whenever I get a split seven inch, it always turns out that one side is 
really good and one side is really not. This theory holds true with this 
split. Kids Meal is has a pretty original Emo/Pop sound that got my 
tail wagging. Growing Up Gomez tries more for the pop than the emo 
and it just doesn’t work as well. Worth picking up for the Kids Meal 
side though. Plus, both sides of the record have pictures from Star 
Wars! (DS) 

(The Buddy System PO Box 49514 Austin, TX 78765) 

Kill Devil Hill, 7" 

This two song seven inch is hard to explain. The music is definitely 
blues like but has the energy of punk rock. If you haven’t seen them 
live you will like this 7" a lot more because they are so damn good 
live. This band is tight, not like in a production way but the feeling 
on this record is that of three musicians connected by the warmth and 
love of rock and roll. Look for a full length LP out soon. (EA) 
(KDH, PO Box 6065, East Lansing, MI 48824) 

Lean - “Unresponsive” 7" 

I saw Lean recently and was really impressed. Live they reminded 
me of Samiam, except that they had this frantic energy that one would 
usually associate with bands on Gravity (or in that vein). So I bought 
this record from them. Recorded they sound a lot like older 
Jawbreaker. I could see this band getting really huge if they stick with 
it. (DL) 

(Rupreckt Records 10 Manstor Manor Bear, DE 19701) 

Lincoln- s/t, 7” 

Although this is no replacement for the out of print Watermark 7”, 
this is still Lincoln so it is still unbelieveably good. Lincoln, in my 
opinion, is one of the best bands to come around in recent years and 
it’s damn too bad that they didn’t stick it out. This record was 
recordded some time ago, and Lincoln has since broken up. They go 
beyond the Emocore sound into something very much their own. 
Plus, the drummer makes the best faces in the world, two of which are 
captured in the record’ s packaging. Pick it up, you probably won’t be 
sorry. (DS) 

(Art Monk Construction PO Box 1105, State College PA 16804- 
1105) 


Luzifers Mob-s/t, 7" 

I first heard these punx on the ‘Close Your Eyes and See Death’ comp 
with my fave band Capitalist Casualties on it. They are one of those 
infamous German grindcore bands, but damn they do it well. This is 
really fast grindcore with some really cool vocals that are pretty high 
for grindcore, but work well with the music. Luzifers Mob does a 
good job of combining slower heavier stuff with blazing speed and 
kind of keeps in the middle of those aspects. They remind me quite 
a bit of Hated Principles or maybe a less heavy Destroy with different 
vocals. This is definately a great grindcore 7” and I recommend you 
pick it up really soon. (JE) 

(Skuld Records; Maybachstr. 7; 70839 Gerlingen, Germany) 

Man Dingo-ifive, LP 

This really reminds me of J-Church... The vocals, the music, the 
arrangements... they all have that same J-Church feel. Although a bit 
more poppy and less emo/moody , this disc has a lot of catchy, hooky, 
pop-punk sing-along-as you bounce up and down on your bed-type 
songs to bring you out of that bad mood after a hard day of smashing 
the state. Check it out.(BVH) 

(DR. Strange Records: P.O. Box 7000-177, AltaLoma, CA 91701) 

Mens Recovery Project- Make A Baby, 7” 

Sam McPheeders has been up to no good with Mens Recovery 
Project. This is pretty much crazyness. MRP is a two piece (I loooove 
two piece punk bands) with guitar and a keyboard playing drum 
machine beats. This is no Ray and Porcell though. You’re SUP- 
POSED to know that they are using a keyboard. Anyway, all in all it’s 
a pretty entertaining listen, but I can’t say that I listen to it all the time. 
The lyrics are really good though (what did you expect from Sam). 
And the record is worth picking up for the cover art alone. (DS) 
(Vermiform; Po Box 12065; Richmond, VA 23241) 

Merel-S/T, LP 

No surprises on this record. Think Ebultition sound and then find 
their older 7" and listen to that. This is a short playing record with the 
emo sound we have all grown to love(?). I really liked their first 
release a lot and I was really excited about this record but some bands 
can pull of great 7" records but few can do a full album. I have heard 
they were great live but this record doesn’t capture that. The lyrics 
are very personal and damn good reading. This isn’t really a bad 
record and I would still recommend it I just really wanted this to be 
as good as their previous stuff. (EA) 

(Gern Blandsten, 305 Haywood Drive, Paramus, NJ 07652) 

Nausea-Lie Cycle, 7” 

A re-release of an old 7” on Graven Image. Yer basic Discharge 
meets Motorhead style thrashorama on the first side, while the flip 
sounds like a medium Neurosis tune. Never saw what was so great 
about this band myself. Competent, sure, but these songs are widely 
available on the Nausea mega-cd on Selfless, why not do a record by 
a GOOD BAND THAT IS AROUND NOW??? Drop Dead or Spazz 
wipe the litter box with these guys anyways. (SW) 

(Skuld Records; Maybachstr. 7; 7039 Gerlingen, Germany) 




Neglect - 5 song CD 

Total Hate-core, but in this case the vocalist seems to be hating 
mainly himself. Lyrics like, “I was meant to be aborted, misshaped 
and contorted, I would have been better off’, are the norm. These 
guys are from New York. Stop for a minute and imagine what this 

probably sounds like Yep! That’s exactly what they sound 

1 i ke ! If y ou ’ re a fan of S heer Terror and B iohazard then thi s is for you . 
(DL) 

(We Bite Europe, Gonninger Str.3, 72793 Pfullingen, Germany) 

NOFX-Don’t Call Me White/Punk Boy, 7" 

Melodic head-bobbin’ beats on white vinyl. The first song is an 
apology for being’ part of the stinkin’ majority — ”1 ain’t part of a 
conspiracy, I’m just yr average Joe. ..I’m just so fuckin’ ordinary 
white.” The second song/side is a quick but clever little one-off about 
the baddest punk in town with the best couplet I’ve heard in a long 
time: “Gotta face like Charles Bronson, Straight outta Green Bay, 
Wisconsin.” These guys are proof that simple and fun doesn’t mean 
stoopid. (KF2) 

(Fat Wreck Chords, POB 460144, San Francisco, CA 94146 


(Johann’s Face; P.O. Box 479-164; Chicago, IL 60647) 
Pachinko-Deep Inside, 7" 

I met B rad of Rhetoric Records at a show he set up while I was visiting 
Madison. It was a great show, and it really started me on the path to 
the music that’s my favorite now. I’ve looked out for his label ever 
since, and been very happy with it. Horace Pinker and Still Life are 
now two bands that I love. . . But this record really threw me for a loop. 
It’s really heavy Am Rep type stuff, but played a little faster. At first 
listen, I didn’t really like it, but after a while it grew on me and now 
I think this record is pretty damn swell. Plus it looks cool. (M.B.) 
(Rhetoric Records; P.O. Box 82; Madison, WI 53701) 

Parasites-Pair, LP 

The parasites continue with their sugary sweet punk rock that ends up 
sounding like a distorted version of the Beatles. This is one of their 
best releases yet, but they ’ ve actually all been really good, so how can 
you draw the line? Anyways, if you like sweet pop-punk then this is 
for you. (WD) 

(Shredder Records;75 Plum Tree Ln. #3; San Rafael, CA 94901 


NOFX-Punk in Drublic, LP 

NOFX continues to rock hard and keep blasting their original style 
of melodic hardcore that started the genre. For this album they 
continue to change and they’ve spead up a little bit, but they 
definately haven’t lost their zany humor. NOFX is the juggernought 
of melodic hardcore, they’re simply unstoppable and can never do 
anything wrong. (WD) 

(Epitaph; 6201 Sunset Blvd. suite 1 1; Hollywood, CA 90028) 
Noneleftstanding -Laura, 7” 

Hmmmm. I like Noneleftstanding a lot. I’ ve seen them a whole bunch 
of times. But this seven inch sounds NOTHING like NLS. What’s 
up? It’s as if none of them could make it to the studio on recording 
day, so they just took some people at random. OK, maybe it’s just the 
mix, but that doesn’t explain why Tim, the singer, just sounds 
NOTHING like Tim, the singer. Wow. I just don’t know what to 
make of this. Aliens perhaps? (DS) 

(Rhetoric Records 516 Highland Ave. Madison, WI 530705) 

Noodle-fatass meets scatman chuck, 7" 

This 7" was not for me at all. i’m sick of music that (i hope) is all a 
joke, the cover art was stupod and disgusting, the music was terrible, 
i do not like 90210 at all and even i though the song “i had a wet dream 
about the girls from 90210” was just dumb. If you’re going to have 
a band to purposly play bad music. ..keep it to yourself. (KF) 
($3;Little deputy and stud records po box 7066 austin texas 78713- 
7066) 

Oblivion-Stop Thief!, LP 

Great pop punk with an original feel to it. I heard one of their 7"’s 
a long time ago, and I thought it had a jazzy feel to it. But that’s not 
it. It’s better than average, and most definitely does not get boring 
like some pop punk records. Singalong choruses make this fun for 
the whole family. (M.B.) 


The Phuzz-This Punk Called Rock, 7” 

Can anyone say snotty, stupid, three-chord punk rock? This is really 
cool, although the drums could be louder. The singer is by far the best 
part of the band, he is just plain out AWESOME!!! Especially the 
back up la la la’s. It’s great (WD) 

(Kantzalis Records; 1034W. “i” st.; Ontario, CA 91762 #173) 

Physics, 7" 

There are 1 1 members listed in the credits of this San Diego outfit, 
so by sheer power of numbers they have a more than a little buzz built 
up down here. If you are looking for something truly different, this 
is it. All moody instrumentals, the label is unmarked and I have no 
clue as to what the song titles are (if any) or which goes first, but one 
was heavy on rhythm and percussion, very edgy and anxious. The 
second began and ended with the sound of chirping birds, with 
throbbing guitar, clangy drums, sort of muted and distorted, in the 
middle. It reminded me of the movie, “Black Velvet,” although I 
couldn’t explain why. I know it shouldn’t count, but I must mention 
the gorgeous all-black packaging. I look forward to seeing them live 
soon.(KF2) 

(Dagon Productions, POB 17995, Irvine, CA 92713) 

Pivot/Bureau of the Glorious, 7" 

This is exactly what I was hoping for. Pivot plays total cool laid back 
melodic-emo-punk with many a sample. It is amazing. It made my 
day. Not to mention BOTG who crank out great discordant emo with 
a female singer. It fits together so well, I can’t speak. You must buy 
this 7", if only for the chorus on the BOTG side, not to mention 
everything else. This just makes me want to sit outside and spin 
records until I can’t anymore. The 7" of the month. (M.B.) 
(Sunney Sindicut; 915 L Street C-166; Sacramento, CA 95814) 

Plaid Retina-What I Can’t Have, 7" 

I had never heard Plaid Retina before this record, so I didn’t really 



know what to expect. All I knew is that a lot of people don’t like them 
and they have a lot of stuff out. The music on this is cool, Bass driven 
stuff, at times falling into experimental territory with keyboards and 
samples. The vocals are pretty damn annoying, though. Plaid Retina 
are sort of like Punk’s Iceburn, I guess. (DL) 

(Little Deputy Records P.O. BOX 7066 Austin, TX 78713-7066) 

Plainfield— ’’One Through Eight/PCP Headquarters” 7" 
The A-side (this single has two “A-sides”, so I’m being arbitrary) 
sounds like a guy who hasn’t taken his lithium recently ranting at a 
bus stop, only with a guitar line. Amusing. The B-side (see above) is 
more of the same, but instead of just being non-linear, the ranting is 
about cutting up a woman. Not funny at all, guys... (SC) 

(Bovine, PO Box 2134, Madison WI 53701) 

Polio-Hercules, 7” 

Distorted scratch and screech guitars, a furious rhythm section, and 
vocals that get a bit over dramatic in spots. “Ice Axe” rocks with a 
mean Big Black style guitar volley, “Action:Reaction:” pummels 
maniacally in a NoMeansNo-ish way, but the third song doesn’t 
continue the energy of these two. Has both lyrics and song “expla- 
nations” (also ‘ala Big Black) for those inclined, and the cover is 
printed on an interesting textured stock to round out this bands’ debut 
e.p. Solid noise from Texas. (SW) 

($3; Turkey Baster Rec’s; 6403 Johnny Morris #12; Austin, TX 
78724) 

Potatomen -On the Avenue, 7” 

I am in love with the Potatomen!! This seven inch is absolutly 
wonderful! ! A day hasn’t gone by since I got it that I haven’t listened 
to it at least twice. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m a freak when it 
comes to music, and many of you punk purists probably won’t like 
this one iota. It is electric/acoustic pop punk, with a definite cowboy 
influence. It’s not country. Before country there was a style of music 
sung by lonesome cowboys, it was sad and melodic and slow. The 
potatomen are all that, only punker. Plus, the lyrics seem really 
inteligent AND funny. Way to go. (DS) 

(Lookout records PO Box 1 1374 Berkeley, CA 947 12) 

Propagandhi/I Spy-split 10” 

I love Propagandhi. When it comes to melodic hardcore there is 
virtually none higher. They are an incredibly talented band and great 
to see live. The first song on their side is a real surprise though, 
because it’s like death or something. If s just weird! I Spy has the 
same sort of sound as Propagandhi so their side is a real treat too. Two 
great political melodic punk bands on one ten inch. (WD) 

($6; Recess Records; Po Box 1 1 12; Torrance, CA 90505) 


Quincy Punx-We’re not Punks, but We Play Them on TV, 
LP 

Cool album title and that’s not all. They are a goofy hardcore band 
that is funny and really good. The best way I can describe them is “the 
FYP of hardcore.” They also cover a GG Allin song (Don’t Talk to 
me) to complete an awesome album. (WD) 

(Recess Records; Po Box 1112; Torrance, CA 90505, and THD 
Records; 2020 Seabury Ave; Minneapolis, MN 55406) 

Rag-Junk, 7" 

Not a single for those with attention deficit disorder. When some- 
thing is happening, this isn’t bad at all; it’s got a female singer I like 
& some interesting guitar work. However, there’s too much time 
spent noodling in these songs and I just lost interest in most of them. 
(SC) 

(Mint Tone Records, PO Box 30931, Seattle WA 98103) 

Raw Power-Screams from the Gutter After Y our Brain, CD 
This is 2 Raw Power LP’s crammed onto one CD and it packs quite 
a bang. This is damn good early 80’ s hardcore the way it was meant 
to be, fast, somewhat catchy, and punk as fuck. It’s classic 5 chord 
screaming punk at it’s finest. Raw Power sounds a lot like what 
Discharge might have sounded like if they had known how to play 
their insturments. This is a MUST buy and is true punk rock at it’s 
finest with power, speed, anger, and disgust. (JE) 

(WestWorld; Box 43787;Tucson, AZ 85733) 

Rupture-Baser Apes, 7” 

Ok grindcore fans get ready. These guys are VERY fast, very loud, 
and very scary. You know what I mean.. .What scares me even more 
then their music is that I think they wish they were death 
metal. ..oh. .well, it’s a cool slab o’ vinyl. (WD) 

(Slap a Ham; P.O. Box 420843; San Fransisco, CA 94142) 

Schlong-Punk Side Story, LP 

Yep those zanny Schlong boys are at it again but this time they pulled 
some friends in the studio and covered the West Side Story musical 
completely redone. This is brilliant, even if you haven’t seen/heard 
the original you will laugh at this one. Most surprisingly though is 
the wonderful singing by the two female singers, Melissa from 
Rauool and Katrina from the Jaks. If you know Schlong that you 
know what to expect, if not then get a clue. Even a rewritten story 
comes with the record so slap this piece of vinyl on your turntable and 
read along about Maria and those wild Jets. (EA) 

(Hopeless Records, 15910 Ventura Blvd, 11th Floor, Encino CA 
91436) 


The Queers/Pink Lincolns-split 7” 

Great live recordings of each band. Ifyoudon’talreadyknowthey re 
both awesome snotty pop-punk bands. The Queers do 5 songs, one 
of which is unreleased. Pink Lincolns do one original and cover 
“suck my left one” by Bikini Kill. This should be heard! Comes with 
a zine too actually mine didn’t)! (WD) 

(Just Add Water, No address) 


Shroomunion-ADV-M9 loves ADV-M, 10” 

. . .remind me of the kind of band I used to occasionally see at the lower 
links in Chicago where everyone in the band wrote poetry which 
they’d sing/scream over varying levels of fugazi-lite and chiming 
guitars done up in weird tunings. This is not a slam. In fact, some of 
those bands were exceedingly entertaining, with that kind of artsy 
power that only people who actually take themselves seriously can 




have. Shroomunion fit that mold — hell , anyone who can write a lyric 
like, “a priori, you wear your crooked halo well/there’s whiskey in 
your water, dear” gets my immediate vote as Bob Dylan of the ‘90s. 
Shroomunion (which also has the benefit of a memorable, albeit 
fatuous name) rock pretty decently too, although with enough slow 
parts (with chiming guitars, of course) to satisfy indie rock fans from 
here to Lee Ranaldo’s house. And, just like with old SY, I like the 
male singer more than the female singer. All in all, it’s pretty damn 
good and worth getting, even if it does have a song with the lyric “in 
; motion, I am moved without moving,” which sounds like Bastro 

before Clark Johnson took a B06 poetry writing class. (DC) 
(Monopoly Records, 4954 Read Rd., Moorpark, CA 93021) 

Skiploader-Sprainy, LP 

Playing in the Jawbox-meets-Fugazi bracket, Portland locals 
Skiploader have crafted 1 3 thoughtful and catchy works of post-punk 
glory. Sounding quite a bit like a much more pop-driven version of 
Jawbox, Skiploader mixes Fugazi-esque bass lines, soft-scratchy 
sounding vocals, well-felt drum hooks and lots of catchy little guitar 
noises and melodies. The production has a very polished live sound, 
which enhances the dual guitar tricks and the clean drum sound. This 
is a CD only release, but well worth it for fans of the above mentioned 
influences. (BVH) 

(Schizophonic Records: 233 Commercial St. NE, Salem, OR 9730 1 - 
3411) 

Sleepy Lagoon D.C.-The Higher You Rise, 7 M 
Three powerful songs on this platter from Germany. This is one of 
the most honest hard-core records to come out in the last couple 
months. Each song hits hard and makes you want to play it again. I 
wouldn’t dare compare this stuff to anything in the U.S. they deserve 
better. Lyrics tend towards the emotional side. Though it maybe hard 
to find seek this record at once. Highly recommended. (EA) 

(Goar, Grindelallee 139, 2000 Hamburg 13) 

Slint-Untitled 2-song CD 

Not being the biggest Slint fan in the world, I’m not sure if this is a 
re-issue of a previous release or what. But, seeing as there’s no 
layout, and the Date on the songs in 1989, I’ll just assume it is a 
reissue... Included are two instrumentals which go along those loud- 
soft-really noisy-soft type arrangements. I like this material better 
than the Spiderland L.P., as it has more hooks and better noisy bursts, 
but it still fails to keep my attention for very long. Fans of Slint surely 
won’t be disappointed by this release from one of the main pioneers 
of this style, but then again, if it’s a reissue they probably have it 
already. ..(BVH) 

(Touch and Go: P.O. Box 25520 Chicago, IL 60625) 

Spavid-7 M 

I got to play with Spavid on tour and they played very hard. After 
returning, this record found its way to my turntable and it captured 
their sound very well. Very Jawbox like, the early stuff with one 
guitar. Three songs with the kind, of lyrics that while reading them 
make no sense but at the same time you know exactly what is being 
said. A full length album out on Humble (formerly Word of Mouth) 

i 


very soon. (EA) 

(Cash Cow P.O. Box 1332 Buffalo, NY 14231) 

Spoke - “All We Need Of Hell” CD 
This CD rules! It starts out totally Groovin’, sort of like Phleg Camp 
used too, with that upbeat, bass-driven, emo style. Little Fuel-like 
bits start to come through, too. Then, at track 5, this poppy, slightly 
80’ s new wave influenced creeps in and it comes across awesome. 
The CD jumps around between these different sounds, and by track 
10 I’ve decided that if these guys had been around back in the 80’ s 
John Hughes would have put them on the soundtrack of at least one 
of his films. “Some Kind Of Wonderful”, maybe. I listen to this 
every day. (DL) 

(Allied Recordings P.O. BOX 460683 San Francisco, CA 94146) 

State Of The Nation-Objective Complete, LP 
This band contains ex-members of legendary Hardcore bands Hard 
Stance and Inside Out, but don’t let that give you any ideas about 
what this will sound like because they will be prove to be wrong. 
S.O.T.N. are not quite “Poppy” and not quite “Emo”, in fact, I don’t 
really know how to categorize this other than to call it Rock. Well, 
sort of, but not quite. Somebody said that they sounded like Jones 
Very. I never really liked Jones Very much, but I love this. Also 
included with this CD is information about The Leonard Peltier 
Defense Committee and The Western Shoshone Defense Project., 
and addresses for both so that you the consumer can find out more for 
yourself and possibly get involved. This is a GREAT record, get one. 
(DL) 

(Jade Tree, 2310 Kennwynn Rd., Wilmington, DE 19810) 

Strung Out-Another Day in Paradise, LP 
I hate to stereotype this awesome band, but they are a typical Fat 
Wreck Chords release which (I think) is a huge compliment. Great 
melodic hardcore that reminds me a lot of Lagwagon, but sorta 
different. I like it... because it rules! (WD) 

(Fat Wreck Chords; Box 460144; San Francisco, CA 94146) 

Suspects-s/t, 7” 

Four tunes of ‘77 inspired punk rock n’ roll. They rely on crunchy 
chords for the majority of the songs, which detracts from the energy 
level of the songs, until they kick up some dust on “Mommy”, only 
to turn in a mediocre three chord punker. No lyrics, boring cover, and 
they spent $800 to record four songs? Uhhh, better luck next time 
guys. Lost in the pack at best. (SW) 

(Torque Records; 3510 N. 8th St.; Arlington, VA 22201) 

Team Dresch- s/t, 7” 

I looove this seven inch! These are slow and wonderful acoustic/ 
electric songs that make my head swim when I listen to them. The 
melodies are really creative (I wish I could say the same about the 
lyrics but there is no lyric sheet and I am terrible at decoding what 
people are singing) as are the guitar parts. Punk or not, this is just 
beautiful music that makes me feel good. (DS) 

(Kill Rock Stars 120 NE State #418 Olympia, WA 98501 




Teengenerate-s/t, 7” 

All hail garage rock! These guys make you wanna boogie the night 
away. They are more on the supercharger, bad-recording, side of 
garage. Nice and slow with a bluesy feel, they rule. (WD) 
(Dionysis Records; Po Box 1975; Burbank, CA 91507 

Three Mile pilot-The Chief Assassin to the Sinister, LP 
• Very original and intriguing stuff coming out of San Diego. The 
vocals are sort of droning, raspy and drawn out, spooky almost. 
Intense lyrical content. Weird instrumentals, one song has some 
middle-Eastern type riffs, bagpipes on another. In some spots it 
sounds like Drive Like Jehu on morphine. How can you resist a 
record packaged in a burlap sack, with a different photo stitched onto 
each copy? Lovely blue-sky vinyl and lyrics inside. This is 3MP’s 
last indie release; apparently they were just signed to Atlantic. I just 
can’ t believe that a major label weasel would like this sort of thing but 
I don’t mean that as an insult to the band at all. Buy now, figure it out 
later. (KF2) 

(Negative Records, c/o Jason Soares, POB 90711, San Diego, CA 
92169. 

Thug-Broken/Lost it, 7" 

Noisy as fuck hardcore, blistering vocals which sound a lot like the 
vocals on the Integrity L.P., but even harsher (if you can imagine 
that), constantly feeding back guitar, and heavier than hell. These 
guys must be painful live...(BVH) 

(Bovine: P.O. Box 2134, Madison, WI 53701) 

Universal Order Of Armageddon-The Switch Is Down, 1 2” 
When UOA is good, they are very very good. When UOA is bad, they 
are very very bad. Unfortunatly , this record has much too much of the 
latter and too little of the former. I don’t know what it is, but at times 
this record reminds me of the RED HOT CHILIE PEPPERS. God, 
for the most part this is really awful. (DS) 

(Kill Rock Stars 120 NE State #418 Olympia, WA 98501) 

Veruca Salt, Seether b/w All Hail Me, 7” 

Power pop. Pretty good power pop, actually, in a Breeders kinda way, 
with two grrls singing about morbid subjects in happy tones, over 
extremely catchy guitar hooks that are technically impossible to 
remove from your head once y ou’ ve heard them. Not as good as some 
of the songs they play live, which are even catchier, and much closer 
to the perfect power pop to which they aspire, but certainly enough 
for any typical consumer if this is the kind of thing to pump your nads. 
The catchier songs which are not on this single will (undoubtedly) be 
on the album that every fucking major label in America is currently 
bidding on. They’ll be huge in a matter of weeks, I guarrantee it. In 
fact, since I started writing this paragraph, I’ve been told that they’re 
in the current issue of Rolling Stone. Too late. (DC) 

(Minty Fresh, P.O. Box 577400, Chicago, IL 60657) 

The Vindictives-Rocks in my Head 
The Vindictives best one yet! They are classic snotty pop-punk and 
Joey’s voice is distinguishable anywhere. Three chord punk is here 
to stay with the help of the Vindictives! (WD) 

(Lookout Records; Po Box 1 1374; Berkeley, CA 94701) 



The Yah-Mos-Off Your Parents 7” 

Fuck Yeah! The Yahmos are the most manic band since HUGGY 
BEAR. I love it! Although they are better live than on the seven inch, 
the record still delivers! This sounds like NATION OF ULYSSIES 
on speed. Plus, the lyrics are pretty insightful. (DS) 

(Recess Records PO Box 1112 Torrance, CA 90505) 

Young Pioneers- s/t, 7” 

Yet another bizzarre project to rise from the ashes of Born Against. 
This time, instead of being rooted in sytho pop (MEN’S RECOV- 
ERY PROJECT) it is based deep in country music ! ! Once again, this 
is a pretty entertaining record, but I don’t think it will be stacked on 
my record player all the time. (DS) 

(Vermiform; Po Box 12065; Richmond, VA 23241) 

Zoinks!/Narcissistic Freds-Split, 7" 

Zoinks! thoroughly covers the almighty pop-punk sound with a 
couple of slightly Green Day sounding pieces called, “False Face,” 
and “New Shoes.” The Narcissistic Freds have more of a Screeching 
Weasel/Queers thing happening, and do it very well with their three 
songs. Both bands are from Reno, Nevada and this five song 7" 
proves to be a pretty good representation of their respective sounds. 
Check it out! (BVH) 

(Satan’s Pimp Records: 1229 Ralston St. Reno, NV 89507) 
Zygote-89-91, LP 

If any of you punx who love Amebix want to get any more stuff by 
them, it’s all hidden under a band called Zygote, which essentially IS 
Amebix. They sound almost exactly like Amebix except they get a 
little boring at times but all Amebix fans will love this LP. It has a 
studio and live side, with the live side even more Venom-esque than 
Amebix or the studio side. A damn good record, too bad Zygote 
didn’t last much longer than Amebix did. This also comes with a huge 
poster to freak yer parents. (JE) 

(Skuld Records; Maybachstr. 7; 70839 Gerlingen, Germany) 
V/A-400 Day Headache, LP 

Proceeds from this record are going towards the Rainforest Action 
Network. Ifthat isn’t enough for you there are 1 5 bands on this record 
with so many different styles you are bound to love something on it. 
It is only $4 ppd (the price of a lot of 7" records) and features 
outstanding tracks by J Church, Animal Farm, Gloo Girls, Assfactor 
4 and Youth Gone Mad. My only complaint is that the record seems 
to be lacking enough information on its cause considering it took 400 
Days to come out. (EA) 

(Unite & Fight Records, 12336 uncg, Greensboro, NC 27413) 
V/A-Comping an Attitude, 10” 

Kids Meal kick out a killer Heroin style rager, Krayons play good 
melodic hardcore, and Figbash and El Santo turn in good tracks too, 
making side “Off’ (the other side is side “Fuck”, of course!) the clear 
winner on this comp of Texas punk bands. Good packaging in the 
usual Turkey Baster style, with a lyrics/graphics booklet, and it’s 
even on splattered clear wax for you 10” junkies. (SW) 




($3; Turkey Baster Rec’s; 6403 Johnny Morris #12; Austin, TX 
78724) 

V/A-eMpTy Records Sampler, CD Only 
I never realized how good the stuff on eMpTy was until I heard this. 
There’s 1 1 bands on here and not a dud among them. They each play 
two previously released songs. Bands featured are: Crackerbash, 
Gas Huffer, Fumes, Girl Trouble, Meanies, Kill Sybil, Sicko, Zipgun, 
Steelwool, Sinister Six, and Putters. Great Comp! (WD) 

(eMpTy Records; Po Box 12034; Seattle, WA 98102) 

V/A-Noise From Nowhere Vol. 10, 7" 

This suffers from bad production. I’ll state that outright. This didn’t 
really excite me, and some of the bands were downright bad. This 
comp, is mostly made up of 3 chord punk rock ‘n’ roll bands, with 
some variety. The lyrics range from ultra-moronic to cool. It’s good 
that they’re documenting their scene, though. (M.B.) 

(Toxic Shock; P.O. Box 43787; Tucson, AZ 85733) 

V/A-Resolve, T 

This is the third in a series of compilation seven inches from a mighty 
fine label. Three songs by three totally different bands. Day Twenty- 
Eight, a female band doing the best song off their demo tape, 
unfortunately it is the same version. The best track is by the 
Deconstruction (from MI not the one with the famous people in it) 
this slower song makes you cringe and twist, powerful stuff. The flip 
side to this record was a disappointing, the song by Urban Farmers 
is long and slow and reminds me a lot of the doors. If you like that 
crazy, experimental stuff maybe you will like it. Two good songs out 
of three isn’t that bad though and is worth your $3 ppd. (EA) 
(Uprising Records, PO Box 4412, Ann Arbor MI 48106-4412) 

V/A-The Smitten Love Song Comp., LP 
This LP will be hot for many reasons. Twelve bands round off this 
comp. The LP comes with a seven inch so those CD buyers get no 
extra tracks (Thumbs up!). It starts off with Jawbreaker doing a 
wonderful song that proves that they can do no wrong. The Cherubs 
do a cover of “I Want Candy”, hopefully you know the song. Other 
highlights include Godhead Silo, Johnboy, Grifters, Unwound and 
Steel Pole Bath Tub. (EA) 

(Karate Brand Records, PO Box 93296 Los Angeles, CA 90093- 


V/A-This Inheritance Must be Refused, LP 
Alright if you can get by the uselessness of a one sided record you 
may like this one. I think that this could of been a great 7" record. 
Why not get more bands I know that there a millions of bands who 
would give tracks for free. Okay, this record does have SpitBoy, The 
Ex, Paxton Quiggly, One by One, Citizen Fish, Spork and Dogfight 
so I was still excited. Unfortunately most of the tracks seem like 
throw away tracks except for the Spitboy track which is a different 
version of “Disfunction”. A great zine like booklet comes with it that 
contains some great reading and the packaging deserves a high mark. 
I just don’t like the thought of wasting half a record. (EA) 

($5 ppd. Hopscotch, PO Box 1962, Dearborn, MI 48212) 

V/A-Turban Renewal, A Tribute to Sam the Sham & the 

Pharohs 

This is one of those tribute albums that you are going to love or hate. 
I love it, while my roomate hates it. You probably know a lot more 
of these songs then you think. It took me a while to listen this double 
LP because it starts off with Wooly Bully by Hasil Adkins and it was 
real hard to stand that song. I think you get the point. With bands like 
Lyres, the Mummies, the Phantom Surfers, Devil Dogs and 
Teengenerate you really can’t go wrong. No insert of any kind made 
me a little disappointed but really this is partying music not a record 
you examine with a fine PC tooth comb. (EA) 

(Norton Records, PO Box 646, Cooper station NY, 10003) 

V/A- Viva La Vinyl, 12 M 

Two labels joined forces to put this record together, each compiling 
the tracks for their own side. Campground Records from San Diego 
throw together a pretty much traditional CA punk sound side featur- 
ing Preachers That Lie, The Kids, Tilt Wheel, Queen Mab, Nonsense, 
Jon Cougar Concentration Camp, Krupted Peasant Farmerz, Fight- 
ing Cause, and Sicko. Dead Beat Records throws together the better 
of the 2 sides with Verrucose, Sleeper, Bouncing Souls, Whatever 
(Best track on the record!), Trusty, J Church, and Tilt. This all adds 
up to make a far better than average compilation. This will only ever 
be available on vinyl so don’t bother looking for the CD. (DL) 
(Dead Beat Records 1662 Loblolly CT #146 Kent, OH 44240. 
Campground Records P.O. BOX 15072 San Diego, CA 92175) 


0296) 


V/A-Stop Homophobia, 7” 

A four band comp featuring Fagbash, Pansy Division, Happy Flowers 
& Bads, all of which have gay members (no pun intended, silly), with 
a booklet containing writing, lyrics, comix, graphics, and interviews 
about-you got it-homosexuality . Good concept, too bad the music on 
here isn ’ t up to snuff. . . I would have to say it’ s a toss up as to whether 
it’s worth it or not. If you’re a queer punk living in the middle of 
nowhere, this is probably a confirmation of life itself... I merely 
endured a medium to bad record and found out my pal Rick likes guys 
instead of girls. Doesn’t make a bit of difference to me, I just wish 
there were good tunes to back up the great insert/booklet. (SW) 
($3; Turkey Baster Rec’s; 6403 Johnny Morris #12; Austin, TX 
78724) 


Hey Kids, in a band? Run a la 
bel? Let Punk Planet review 
your records!! Send them to: 
Punk Planet South 
Route 2 Box 438 
Leeds, AL 35094 



TEN -O- SEVEN 


"Happy poppy punk with an old school tinge, kinda' like 
if the Beatles had been a punk band. Lots of catchy sing- 
alongs and choruses that'll stick in your head and come to 
mind at the most unsettling moments." Punk Planet 

"You're Cool" LP/CD $7/$10 "Chainsaw Orchestra" LP $6 


IJ N 1> E R T O M 


“Fuck yeah, this is the noise that has kept me from suicide for twelve 
years. Bleak, torporous apathy is thrashed to almost-death in the sweet 
sounds of hardcore. John’s vocals are perfection, containing the frantic 
rage of a lost soul that was one of the foundations of punk noise and 
attitude.” Willum Pugmire, The Rocket 

"Stalemate" 77CD $3/$6 "AtBoth Ends" LP/CD $7/$10 



NEW UNIT 


"..With the CD case in my hand and the tunes blasting ^ 
on the stereo, everything fucked up in the world seems | 

OK for a while.. .You must get this if you at all like 
melodic, energetic, original, hardcore." Jason 
Schreurs, Terminal City 

"Under The Big Top" CD $8 

S L EE.P E 11 

"Quickly following up their 7" on Allied, New York Gods 
Sleeper, have crafted several melodic-tinged and emo-style 
hardcore sounding punk songs for your enjoyment. Songs 
range in style from ALL-esque power-pop to Bad Religion 
style harmonies and sing alongs. An exceptionally slick 
sounding piece of wax." Bret Van Horn, Punk Planet 
"Preparing Today for Tomorrow's Breakdown" LP/CD $7/$10 


i * 


Also: Rake - "Stupor" 7" $3.00, Ringworm - "The Promise" LP $6.00, Strain CDep $6.00 
Soon: New Rake 7", Undertow/Resolution split CD, N.W. punk/H.C. comp., Jayhawker 7 
Prices are postage paid in the U.S. - Can/Mex add $1 - Europe add $3 - Asia ad S 

EXCURSION P. O. BOX 20224 SEATTLE, WA 98102 


Riot Nrrd Sez: Buy This Shit! 



RER 005: Bugjuice Que Va! CD/CS. From 
the old school of Boston indie grunge-pop, a la 
early Dino Jr., Mission of Burma, et. al. 16 
songs from this three piece; some fast, some 
slow, some loud, some soft. Get it, jerky. 

RER 004: Sinkhole 7". 3 new, unreleased 
songs. Features the buzzsaw pop of "Donkey", • 
the rage of "Alterna-Hunka-Shit," and the 80 s 
cheese of Eddie Money's "I Think I'm In Love." 

RER 003: Doc Hopper Aloha CD/CS. 1 1 

songs filled with melody and frustration. You'll 
laugh, you'll ciy, you'll pogo. 

RER 002: Sinkhole Groping For Trout 

CD/CS. Call It pop, call it punk, call it rock, 
call it pop-punk-rock. 10 Things calls it 
"beautiful." 


o 

r-H 

I 

in 

oo 

co 

o 


X 

2 


CD $9, CS $6, 7" $3.50 postpaid U.S. 

Outside the U.S., please add postage. 



Ringing 

Ear 

Records 



Here are the zine reviews for this time. And the reviewers are: Matt Berland (MB), Will 
Dandy (WD), Karen Fisher (KF), Dave Larson (DL), Dan Sinker (DS), Jim Testa (JT), and Bret 


Van Horn (BVH) 

#2 FANZINE #1 

You’ve all heard about Generation X, now 
here comes Generation Y (or maybe X: 
The Next Generation?) Anyway, editor 
Keith is “barely 20 years old,” and uses his 
zine to ruminate on things he thinks about. 
That includes a lot of band interviews 
(Seaweed, Slant 6, New Bomb Turks, 
Edsel, Standoff, Yuppicide,) his thoughts 
on Nixon’s death, reviews, a “where are 
they now” piece about tv stars of the past, 
and so on. Lots to read in this debut ish. 
(JT) 

(Keith Werwa, 512 E 5 St #2/4, NY NY 
10009 $1)) 

3 WAY STREET #1 

This is by Amanda and Sam, whom I 
assume are going together. Anyway, 
Amanda visits San Francisco, Sam inter- 
views Rig, Sam rants about men’s rights, 
they both review records and interview the 
person who runs the Anti-BBS. The zine 
looks really nice, esp. for a first issue. (JT) 
(28332 PV Drive East, RPV, CA 90274, 2 
stamps) 

1 0THINGS JESUS WANTS YOU 
TO KNOW #8 

This is a consistently good zine out of the 
NW. This one has interviews with NOFX, 
Christopher Robin, Zoinks!, Victor (Chaos 
UK), Voodoo Glow Skulls, Unsane, and 
others. The interviews are very well done, 
and the rest is just ads and record reviews. 
Good. Not amazing, but good for what it is. 
(M.B.) 

($1 .50; 1 0 Things; 1 407 NE 45th St. #1 7; 
Seattle, WA 98105) 

99mm 

Only a few short paragraphs and a few 
record reviews, not enough to say it’s a 
promising start. I’d recommend gathering 
a little more stuff together before printing 
the next one. I like the colored paper, 
though. (KF) 

(Send stamps for copy) 1 12 SE 18th, Oly 
WA 98501 . 

360 #14 

A really well put together zine with good 
interviews and well-written reviews. Like 
everyone elso on the (punk) planet, the 


editors find themselves embroiled in the 
corporate-vs.-punk debate on the letters, 
page, then move on to chat with fluf, 
Unsane, Uncle Tupelo, Slowdive, and 
Manhole. Good issue.(JT) 

(PO Box 81 623, San Diego CA 921 38 $1 ) 

394 OCONEE #4 

Pattie’s R.E.M. fanzine comes with a color- 
xerox cover and a pull-out pinup of Mike 
Stipe this issue, along with an analysis of 
the lyrics to “Gardening At Night” and a 
history of R.E.M. t-shirts. (JT) 

(Pattie Kleinke, PO Box 1 026, NY NY 1 0023 
$3) 

ABUSE #4 

“Death & Dying Issue,” how cheery. I wasn’t 
even aware this kind of thing existed — I 
thought male art was Michelangelo’s 
Davide, but no, it’s a collection of different 
artists’ works, mailed into one editor, who 
compiles the mail art zine and distributes it. 
This one’s 104 pgs. with almost as many 
contributors. All pieces run along the same 
theme, all re-printed faithfully as the origi- 
nal submissions, ranging from funny, 
simple, riveting, psychotic, repulsive, smart. 
Some I cannot even finish (I am ultra- 
squeamish and sensitive.) The concept of 
mail art is fascinating but shaky; in this 
case it is not only a success but the individual 
pieces truly play off of and complement 
one another. A fine job by the editor. The 
first 350 orders receive not only the main 
zine but extra stickers, flyers, booklets and 
a 7-inch. Next issue (out this fall?): “Body 
Fluids, Body Functions.” Do I dare? (KF) 
($4) POB 1242, Allston MA 02134. 

ADVENTURES OF A-GIRL #3 
When I find something I like this much, I’m 
never quite sure whether to tell everyone or 
keep it as my own hidden treasure. I must 
resolve to share with the world, I suppose 
it’s my duty. 1 6 pgs. of original comics; this 
issue features “Manga Hunt,” A-Girl in Ja- 
pan. A is for Adventure! Other issues avail- 
able, too: collect them all!(KF) 

($1 plus stamps) c/o Elizabeth, 120 S. San 
Fernando Blvd., #231 , Burbank CA 91 502. 


(ALMOST) NOTHING BUT 
RECORD (TAPE & VIDEO) REVIEWS 
Fall ’94 

Mykel Board, the MRR columnist you love 
to hate, returns with what may be the last 
issue of his peripatetic reviews-only zine. 
There are skillions of reviews of things 
Mykel gets in the mail (except he won’t 
review anything on a major label.) This 
issue also comes with a short cassette of 
spoken word performances by Mykel.(JT) 
(Seidboard World Ent., Box 1 37, NY NY 
10012 $2.50) 

BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED #6 
A newsletter-style zine dedicated to porn, 
although there isn’t a single dirty picture 
included . Instead you get essays on work- 
ing as a bondage model, tips from a pro 
on making porn videos, a piece on why 
foreskins are better, and kinky letters from 
readers.(JT) 

(Richard Freeman, 130 W Limestone St, 
Yellow Springs OH 45387 $2) 

BLINK #6 

A nice mixture of personal and punk 
zineage, with lots of columns about non- 
musical matters, some local Miami news 
coverage, and then interviews with bands 
like Killdozer, Peach, and Sheer 
Terror. (JT) 

(16901 NE 8 St, N Miami Beach FL 33162 
$ 2 ) 

BLUE ROSES #1 

Geneva Gano has put out a very moving 
first effort with Blue roses #1 . Lots of very 
personal writings about her life and de- 
pression and confusion and relationships 
and everything that makes life worth liv- 
ing. Included in this issue: An article about 
Blake from Jawbreaker and how he 
seemed like the only one who could un- 
derstand her depression, a very personal 
article about homosexuality and living 
through it in a small town, some cool 
fiction, some various reviews, a free mini- 
zine called “Josh” (which is one of the 
highlights, too), and much more. This is 
the kind of writing I aspire to. Highly rec- 
ommended, write her a letter and make 
sure she keeps it up! (BVH) 

(Send one dollar, comparable stamps, or 
a trade to: Blue Roses P.O. Box 7005 
Stanford. CA 943091 





A 




BOWLING FOR DOUGHNUTS #5 
Xeroxed punkzine with Pennywise, No 
FX, the Meatmen, 7 Seconds, Offspring, 
Jermflux, opinion columns, reviews, comix, 
and photos.(JT) 

(3 1 1 5 W 6 St, Suite C Dept 1 03, Lawrence 
KS 66049 $2) 

BRV 

This is basically a travelzine ala’ 
Cometbus, about editor Al’s adventures 
on the road, along with several pages of 
photos he took along the way and some 
zine contact addresses. The highpoint of 
this issue is the rear ender that gets Al and 
his carmates carted off to the hoosegow 
for a visit. (JT) 

(11473 Chautauqu Tr, Brecksville OH 
44141 $2) 

BURPIN’ LULA 

Reviews of all kindsa stuff. Cut and paste 
bits fill in any offending empty areas. The 
reviews are in no special order; records, 
zines and anything else they like and want 
to talk about are crammed in as tight as 
possible. Funny, different. Send them 
anything and they will review it. They dare 
you! I have to say, though, it’s a lame 
name. (KF) 

(Free! send stamps for copy) POB 1 4738, 
Richmond VA 23221. 

CHAIRS MISSING 

A really well written zine with very small 
print, with lots of interviews and reviews. 
This issue has Alcohol Funnycar, 
Arcwelder, Drive Like Jehu, Mule, 
Prisonshake, Rodan, and Seven Year 
Bitch. It’s interesting how John Reis from 
Jehu totally wimps out of discussing ex- 
actly how Rocket From The Crypt and 
Jehu got signed to Interscope for 
megabucks while making it sound like the 
most punk-rock happenstance in the 
world. (JT) 

(Aug. 94) (PO Box 522, Stratford CT 06497 
$3) 

CIRCA #1 and 2 

A messy little half-size scene still in its 
infancy but with a lot of promise thanks to 
the better-than-average interviews. Editor 
James Knoblauch asks Southern Culture 
On The Skids if they speak with the same 
drawl back home, for instance. And when 
he asks the Poster Children what they find 
stimulating in the arts these days, the 


answer is “Computer hackers and Beavis 
& Butthead.” (JT) 

(216 Mayer St, Reading PA 19606 $1) 

CONSPIRACY COMIX #4 
Not too many pages of hand-scribbled stuff, 
thoughts, cut’n’paste, no real comix. What’s 
there is pretty good, esp. the hot dog haiku 
and the Eddie VedderA/etta comparison. I 
got lots of stickers and stuff stuck into my 
copy, which is always nice. #5 is already 
out, I hope she’s expanded it 
somewhat.(KF) 

(500 + stamp or 3 stamps or trade) 1015 
Addison St., Berkeley CA 94710. 

DEEP WATER #1 

A really interesting new zine with nice lay- 
outs and offbeat articles - there’s a piece 
about the Hegins (OH) Pigeon Shoot, a 
day when everyone in town goes out into 
the woods and legally shoots all the pi- 
geons, a piece on the Nixon era war on 
drugs, an interview with Jimmy Johnson of 
Forced Exposure, and some reviews.(JT) 
(PO Box 211, Danville PA 17821 $2) 

DUMPSTERLAND #6 
After a full year in the making, Dumpsterland 
#6 finally comes out. It’s absolutly huge 
(100+ pages) and is packed full of little 
doodle art, thoughfull and thoughtless writ- 
ings, a No Empathy tour diary, and an 
enlightening article about the pseudo punks 
that hang outside of a Dunken Donuts in 
Chicago. As with every Dumpsterland, it’s 
an entertaining read, but don’t go in ex- 
pecting anything really meaningful. (DS) 
($2.00 PO Box 267873 Chicago, IL60626- 
7873) 

ENGINE #2 

I’ve gotten lucky with zines this month. A 
bunch of good ones. This is great. It’s got 
neat stories by Lance of J Church and an 
interview with Dan O’Mahony. This is what 
a sXe zine should be. He’s not preachy, 
just cool. Way cool. This is in a tie with 
Second Guess for my zine of the month. 
(M.B.) 

(3 Stamps or Trade; Engine; P.O. Box 
640928; S.F., CA 94164-0928) 

ENVY THE DEAD #4 
A crazy new half-size zine with inspired 
gonzo writing and layouts. And unlike most 
punkzines, these dudes even listen to hip 
hop. There are way too many articles to list 


m 


(and most of them are so off the wall that 
it would take foreverto explain them,) but 
a few of them include a Lisa Suckdog 
experience, an ode to Robitussin (as a 
recreational drug,) four reasons why 
Public Enemy are the best rap group, 
and a review of the Beastie Boys that 
doesn’t mention any of their music.(JT) 
(PO Box 30033, Kansas City MO 641 1 2) 

FEMINIST BASEBALL #3 
Big fat fanzine straight outta Seattle. 
Some interviews; lots of live show re- 
views (good); zine, book and movie re- 
views; story about M.K.F. Fisher; likes & 
dislikes, etc. But the hilite is tons o’ record 
reviews, original and interesting to read 
in themselves even if you don’t care 
about the music. All styles, not yertypical 
it sucks/it rules/sounds like Crimpshrine 
meets Buzzcocks crap. I have to admire 
anyone who listens to this many records 
and takes the time to write about them so 
thoughtfully. This one’s marked Winter 
93/94; there must be a new one out by 
now, no? (KF) 

($3) c/o Jeff Smith, POB 9609, Seattle 
WA 98109. 

FLATTER! #4 

I love Flatter! more with each passing 
issue. This newest one talks about Jaina’s 
trip to New Orleans with buddy Christine 
Shields; great letters section; 3 Day 
Stubble photo essay; makeup reviews; 
advice column; comix and illustrations 
by the aforementioned Ms. Shields, A- 
Girl Elizabeth Watasin and others; an- 
other original centerfold; and tons more 
little tidbits and idiosyncracies. I love the 
little forture-cookie messages that are 
found on each page. Looking thru it for 
my review I realize I haven’t finished all of 
it yet, so order your own copy godammit! 
Write Jaina Davis, your lovely and tal- 
ented editrix 

(POB 40791, SF, CA 94140-0791 and 
send $2.) 







(0EE 




FUH COLE #5 
This is a cool fanzine here. There’s 
stories about travelin, comix, and some 
homosexual viewpoints. There’s also 
some of those “magic eye” things on the 
cover of what looks like a punk rocker. 
Anyways it’s really cool and a fun read, 
but it’s their last issue. ..oh well. (WD) 
($2ppd; Dave Houle; c/o FuhCole : Po Box 
477765; Chicago, IL 60647) 

GENETIC DISORDER #1 2 
Theme: “Believe it or Not.” Brenda Spen- 
cer (“I Don’t Like Mondays”) is on the 
cover! Yes, her killing spree was right 
here in America’s.finest city. Inside there 
are stories on other infamous SD 
bloodspilling butchers. Also a hilarious 
tale of editor Larry’s adventure taking two 
high school girls to their prom. Super 
record reviews, as always. It’s refreshing 
to read something that doesn’t take itself 
too seriously but that’s this funny and 
good. This is the best zine in town... dare 
I say the world? 

($2+4 stamps, POB 151362, San Diego, 
CA 92175) 


HEARTATTACK #2 

The second issue of HaC finds Kent 
McClard re-thinking the goals and future 
of the magazine. What comes out of it is 
better than the first, but still lacks the 
spontinaety and originality that a zine of 
this format requires. I’m sure that will 
come with time though. A great interview 
with Los Crudos and an interview with 
Iconoclast, columns, and reviews. (DS) 
($1 .00 PO Box 848 Goleta, CA 931 1 6) 

HERD #3 

More mail art. Networking issue. Lots of 
letters and good historical essays on the 
mail art scene; discussions of male vs. fe- 
mail art. Send her stuff to print. Art from a 
xerox machine, what a concept. (KF) 
($2+stamps) do Jennifer Huebert, POB 
395, Rifton NY 12471. 

HINCKLEY #2 

This is a great fanzine done by Tim, the 
lead singer of Avail. It's a great mix of 
personal stories, politics and history. 
There's also a few stories about when 
people have found guys masturbating. 


It’s all really cool and done well. (WD) 

($1 and 2 stamps; Tim; 1717 Main St.; 
Richmond, VA 23220) 

KETTLE OF FISK #3 
Small but multi-paged mail art/networking 
booklet. Has lots of addresses and refer- 
ences for collective art projects. Good 
background on the genre, but after getting 
whopped on the brain with Abuse (reviewed 
above), this looked kinda anemic. (KF) 
($1/trades too) do Afungusboypress, 16 
E. Johnson St. #C, Phil PA 19144-1918. 

LOUD AS HELL #2 

This is by two high-school girls, Jenna and 
Anne, who write about all sorts of stuff: who 
they love, who they hate; the typical teen 
angst, female alternative style. I like any- 
thing handwritten that is crammed with lots 
of little tidbits (that way it takes longer to 
read and seems like more for your money). 
Plus I am a sucker for colored paper and 
they love Jaina from Flatter! as do l.(KF) 
($1 +stamps) 2 Hathaway Lane, Verona N J 
07044. 

MIDDLE GROUND #2 
A cool just-outside-of-Berkeley zine. Loves 
Tiger Trap, Potatomen, Cometbus, and 
Crimpshrine. This guy has taste. A story 
and an interview with the aforementioned 
Potatomen. Wish it was longer. (MB) 
(50c; Tyson; 13393 La Barr Meadows; 
Grass Valley, CA 95949) 

MONKEYSHINE #3 

This is a rad zine with an old Cometbus 
feel. It’s got interviews with Fugazi, Born 
Against, and Citizen Fish. A definite good 
read. And I really like the layout. It’s too 
short, I want more. Yes. (M.B.) 

($1 or trade; 85 E 1 9th; Eugene, OR 97401 ) 

MOLE #7 

A zine “by, for, and about the nihil genera- 
tion,” with fiction, comix, interviews with 
Cake Kitchen, Scrawl, Cop Shoot Cop, 
Jeffrey Lee Pierce, reviews, and a talk with 
someone who’s a grip in the movies. They 
put a little different spin on the same old 
punkzine genre which makes this a good 
read.(JT) 

(PO Box Merrifield VA 221 16 $3) 
MUDFLAP #6 

Revolution bike style now! Lots of super 
comics, Toronto bike scene report (good), 


Eastern European travel tales (even bet- 
ter), reviewed bike messenger novels 
(so many!), super funny interview with Al 
Sobrante, story by Aaron Cometbus — 
let’s just say in this issue, all the features 
are hilites. This is one of my all-time 
faves, just stop me now before I go into 
my ranty, ravy thing which makes me 
look like a spaz. You will like it lots, OK? 
(KF) 

($1+2 stamps) do Greta, 2629-1 9th St., 
SFCA 94110. 

NICE HAIR #1 

Fuck Yeah!! This is the first solo outing 
for Kim Bae, who has been contributing 
to Dumpsterland for years. It’s absolutly 
rules!! Really well written personal pieces, 
great photos, cute little drawings, and an 
interview with Joey Vindictive & Jenny 
Gee about being punk rock parents!! 
Pick this up, you probably won’t be 
dissappointed, I wasn’t! (DS) 

(294 Churchill Northfield, IL 60093) 

NO LONGER A FANZINE #5 
Editor Joseph Gervasi has made NLAF 
one of the most consistently well written 
and interesting zines around, especially 
because his penchant for speaking his 
mind and being open to all sorts of 
controversial ideas often inflames P.C. 
types. This issue includes interviews 
with the editor of Fuck Zine, white su- 
premacist James Mason, a tour diary, 
hate mail from readers, a piece about 
working in a library, and lots more.(JT) 

(1 42 Frankford Ave, Blackwood NJ 0801 2 
$ 1 ) 

NOT EVEN #5 

Great. What else does one expect from 
Not Even fanzine? This is one great zine, 
and #5 is no exception. Just the right mix 
of personal and political, funny and seri- 
ous. Pick this one up!! This issue fea- 
tures an interview with a women’s self 
defence teacher, and plenty of thought 
provoking articles. (DS) 

(PO Box 181 19 Washington DC 20036- 
8119) 

OCULUS July/Aug. 94 
Mad Libs with the band Tree, 7 inch 
reviews, interviews with Engine Kid, 
Fudge, Brian Eno, and fluf, all wrapped 
up in clean, modern layouts. Classy. (JT) 
(PO Box 148, Hoboken NJ 07030 $1) 






A 





ONE IS SILVER & THE OTHER 
IS GOLD #1 

A silly 8-page punkzine with a Bedspins 
intvw and a test to see how PC you 
are.(JT) 

(625 SW 10 Ave #291 B, Portland OR 
97205 2 stamps) 

OPTION PARALYSIS #3 
This issue reveals the secret identities of 
the Men In Black (turns out they’re Jake 
and Elwood, the Blues Brothers,) pieces 
on hockey and baseball mania, live re- 
views of Superchunk and Luna, and 
record reviews. Interesting layouts. (JT) 
(Marty Langley, 8114 Adair Lane, 
Springfield VA 22151 $1) 

OUT OF THE LOOP #1 
Weird. A christian-pro-life-skate-punk- 
zine? I like the handwritten stationary 
thing he sent me (plus two points). I hate 
the rigid missionary Christian pro-life 
stance (minus a zillion). Interview with 
the Bollweevils, but... I don’t know. Well, 
no I don’t think so. Sorry. (M.B.) 

(Free; Adam; 4700 S. Barna Ave. Apt. 
102; Titusville, FL 32780) 

PEACHES AND HERBICIDE #5 
This is a neat zine with some cool per- 
sonal writings (the best being about weird 
sites in the mid-west) along with plain-old 
crazy stuff written about washing laun- 
dry, ESP, and Taco Heaven. Also in- 
cluded are interviews with Assfactor 4, 
Kent McClard. This was a fun zine to 
read and it reads quickly. (WD) 

(75 cents; Mark; Peaches and Herbicide; 
PO Box 49514; Austin, TX 78765) 

PEECH FUZZ #3 

“The Family Issue” actually deals with 
more than one issue. Screw record re- 
views and all that crap (sorry guys). You 
know, anyone can listen to 30 7-inchers 
and BS their way thru (witness my pitiful 
attempts herein) but some people can 
actually write stuff about life and love and 
thoughts and how people are, without 
making it sound stupid and boring like I 
am now. Creepy styley comix and other 
neat stuff. I love interviews of “normal” 
people! (KF) 

($1+stamps) c/o Leyna Papach, 3836 
Wyandotte, KC MO 64111. 


PUMPKIN SEED #5 

A punk zine with a short attention span - 
everything is in big type and no more than 
a page or two long. Unwound, Bridget 
Cross, Trumans Water, Edsel, and lots of 
reviews. (JT) 

(229 Westmount Blvd, Thornhill, Ontario, 
CANADA L4J 7W2 $2) 

R.A.D. #3.14 

Musings and rantings on the music scene 
by the Rev. Keith A. Gordon, including a 
long chat with singer Sass Jordan, rapping 
about rap, a review of Manic Pop Thrill, 
and well-written reviews. Definitely a little 
different and worth reading. (JT) 

(826 Old Charlotte Pike E, Franklin TN 
37064 $2) 

RAGE #3 

Fiction, poetry, and think pieces on a vari- 
ety of subjects, from writer’s block (from 
the editor,) to Kurt Cobain. (JT) 

(PO Box 1289, Lk Worth FL 33460 $2) 

RATIONAL INQUIRER #1 
A new newsprint zine that’s trying to keep 
Miami on the map, now that the area’s most 
well- known zine, Scrape, has called it 
quits. MRR-style layouts and poetry, fic- 
tion, columns, interviews with Splat and 
Cereal, and reviews. A nice start although 
it’s a bit too much like all those other M RR- 
inspired zines around. (JT) 

(2050 W 56 St #32-221 , Hialeah FL 3301 6 
$1.50) 

RESEARCH FANZINE #3 
fka “Crusade!” fanzine (still keeps some 
but not all its sXe ties). Political musings, 
interviews & essays. Editor Dave Grenier’s 
heart is in the right place; he’s taking on lots 
of issues (someone has to). Centerpiece is 
the interview with Viq Martin, editrix of 
Simba zine from Britain. I think maybe 
Dave is trying too hard to prove his lame 
theory that feminists are reverse sexists. 
T o declare that it’s sexist to believe women 
must be in charge of women’s organiza- 
tions? Why not just elect a white man as 
head of the NAACP or next chief of the 
Navajo Nation? Carl Karcher for PETA, or 
Ted Kennedy as AA spokesman? But I’m 
quibbling with his politics and not the zine, 
which is work well done, thoughtful and 
thought-provoking. Plus I feel sorry for him 
trying to be a punk in Arizona. (KF) 

($2) POB 44169, Tucson AZ 85733-4169. 


ROLLERDERBY #15 
Can Rollerderby still be reviewed with 
the rest or has it achieved risen-cream 
status? Surely issue after issue of this 
has proven that Lisa Crystal Carver is 
goddess of all zinestresses and muse 
of the masses. But this issue bears 
scrutiny for at least two reasons: first, 
she proclaims her availability as leader 
of Generation L (Kurt C’s dead and he 
didn't wantthe title anyway; we changed 
from X to L cuz X’ers are boring and 
don’t want to accomplish anything im- 
portant). Key Gen-L Manifesto Points: 
No Losers, Whiners Get Killed, and All 
Females Wear Makeup (preferably blue 
sparkly eyeshadow). Second peculiar- 
ity of this issue is that Lisa steps aside 
after her editori-L to let two co-editors 
write most of the rest of the issue. “Girls 
+ Horses” is the theme. Childhood 
memories and other horse tails. (KF) 
($3) POB 1 8054, Denver CO 8021 8. 

RX: DEATH #1 

A cut-and-paste zine dedicated to death. 
This issue is devoted to clippings about 
Kurt Cobain’s suicide. It’s actually kind 
of interesting to read what daily news- 
paper writers and national columnists 
(like the NY Times wonderful Anna 
Quindlen) had to say at the time, like the 
smail-town rockcrit from Charlston, SC 
who says that Kurt Cobain’s singing 
was “almost” as good as Axl Rose.(JT) 
(PO Box 642, G.C. SC 29445 $1) 

SCHEMATICS #1 

sXe zine with all interviews: Avail, 
Iconoclast, Earth Crisis-, and graphic 
artist John Yates. (JT) 

(3017 Barnhard Dr #209, Tampa FL 
33613 $1) 

SCREAMING FROM INSIDE 

#3 

This could be called Carissa Explains It 
All, since the editor’s name is Carissa 
and most of the zine is given over to her 
ramblings on life. There are also letters, 
short interviews with Avail and Naked 
Aggression, and reviews. (JT) 

(PO Box 13044, Mpls MN 55414 $2) 

SECOND GUESS #11 
Rad, rad, rad. I love this zine. I have a 
few previous ones, but this is my favor- 








ite. Pissed off rantings, and a cool Zoinks! 
tour story. Bob Conrad is a good writer, 
which makes for good reading. Donnythe 
Punk tells a sad story of prison rape that 
is necessary reading. It’s big. Get it. 
(M.B.) 

($2; SG; P.O. Box9382; Reno, NV 89507) 

SHAMPOOP #3 

I just got this in the mail right before 
deadline so I haven’t finished reading it 
yet, but there’s a long and interesting 
travel diary in here, mixed in with random 
thoughts and clips of this and that in 
between. One of Matt of Cool Beansl ’s 
favorites (he makes some cameo appear- 
ances). Looks good! (KF) 

($2+stamps) 318.1 Mission #113, SF CA 
94110. 

SLACK #8, #9, #1 1 

A really nice looking desktop zine with tidy 
graphics. Every issue has a centerfold of 
the editors’ current listening faves and 
then a theme to the rest of the issue. #8 is 
dedicated to beer, #9 to dead rock stars; 
#9 includes True Crime stories. All do a 
good job covering their themes. As the 
editor says, slackers work harder than 
anyone else, they just don’t like to work 9 
to 5. (JT) 

(%Wizard Graphics, 466 Woodword Ave, 
Buffalo NY 14214 $2) 

SOUND VIEWS #30 
Once again a very comprehensive look at 
the New York underground. It’s zines like 
this that help fuel the whole thing. Plus, as 
an added bonus, it’s enjoyable to read. 
Mostly interviews, with: Wretched Ones, 
Don Fury, Murphy’s Law, etc. A good 
read. Pick it up if you’re in NY. (MB) 
(Free in NY, $1 .50 ppd.; 96 Henry Street, 
Suite 5W; Brooklyn, NY 11201-1713) 

SUCK! #6 

Here’s another zine that takes punkzine 
basics and turns them into something 
new and interesting. There’s a lot of 
inside jokes about the local scene (didn’t 
know Rochester had one, didja?) plus 
gossip plucked off the internet, a list of 
official Sonic Youth guitar tunings, and 
lots of zine and record reviews. (JT) 

(298 Oxford St, Rochester NY 14607 $2) 

SWEATER VEST #1 •' 

An emozine from the editor of the uber- 

■ i *■ ** mi »*i ..... —■ 


straightedge LEGION OF DOOM fanzine?? 

I had my doubts.... But actually this turned 
out to be really good! It seems to have been 
assembled in the midst of a major ideologi- 
cal shiftfor the author, which is an interesting 
thing to witness and to read about. It made 
me think, which is all I ask for in a fanzine. 
(DS) 

(1 6801 S 92nd Ave Orland Hills, IL 60477) 

THAT’S A GOOD QUESTION/ 
OUT OF THE LOOP-Split 
I guess I ragged on Out of the Loop last 
time, so this time I gotta be nice. Well, he 
has less stuff about how he’s Christian and 
Pro-Life (which is good), but it still comes 
across intolerant. Spirituality doesn’t mean 
Christianity. The rest of it is a really cool 
skatezine with stories and pictures. A good 
effort. I like it. (MB) 

(Stamps; TAGQ; 3118 S. Casper Place; 
Titusville, FL 32780) 

THORAZINE #5 

Increasingly pro-looking zine with a nice 
glossy color cover and a flexi-disc with cuts 
by Anal Cunt, Boredoms, Dixie Waste, and 
Eyehategod. This issue includes interviews 
with Mule, Luscious Jackson, and Joey 
Ramone, plus lots more. Crammed with 
text and features, and with the flexi it’s a 
bargain.(JT) 

(Box 571562, Houston TX 77257 $3.50) 
TVI#1 

I hope this is not a one-shot. It’s amusing 
and original as hell. Three friends sitting 
around analyzing MTV and other TV shows 
and music videos. MTV seems so silly and 
harmless and stupid til you really look at it 
for hours on end and realize the crap they're 
passing on as “art.” We have in here tran- 
scriptions of las tres amigas’ discussions 
as well as reprints of several on-line dis- 
cussions featuring and commenting on Ms. 
Courtney Love, the indie scene, riot grrl, 
etc. Very well written , thoughtful and funny. 
More, please! (KF) 

($1+stamps) POB 914, N. Hollywood CA 
91603. 

UNDERDOG ZINE #9 
I'm laying it down right here. The Underdog 
Zine fucking sucks. This has absolutly no 
redeeming qualities, except for the fact that 
it is printed on newsprint, so I can recycle it! 
This magazine oozes with cooler-than-thou 
attitude and inside jokes. What’s the point. 


EH 


A word to all Underdog zine readers 
outside of Chicago: PEOPLE FROM 
CHICAO REALLY AREN’TTHIS DUMB!! 
(DS) 

(PO Box 14182 Chicago, IL 60614) 

UPRISE #9 

This is a really good zine that’s was hard 
to describe last time, and is still hard to 
describe. It’s humorous, and it’s all done 
by this cool guy named Ray. He has a 
very odd interview with a riot grrl, scams, 
top tens, and opinions. Buy it, you won’t 
regret it. (M.B.) 

($1; Uprise; P.O. Box 1420; Sykesville, 
MD 21784) 

WHITE BREAD ZINE #12 
A nice mix of punkzine essentials and fun 
stuff - the band interviews include 
Trumans Water, Low, Grifters, and 
Teenage Velvet. And then there are tips 
on hair care, 15 cool things you can find 
in the editor’s apartment, getting an HIV 
test, an open letter to MRR, and lots of 
reviews.(JT) 

(RPO 4601, PO Box 5063, New 
Brunswick NJ 08903 $2) 

WRONG FANZINE #2 
With only 2 issues out, Wrong has offi- 
cially become my favorite ‘zine. The 
entire thing is done by Peter Hart, who 
also does a smaller ‘zine called Pumpkin 
Eater. Inside this ish. we find Peter 
interviewing Farside, reporting on the 
state of Hardcore in L. A. , discussing such 
topics as drug legalization, bar codes, 
and religion, and lamenting the general 
sad state of Straight Edge. But, our boy 
Pete isn’t one to just complain and offer 
nothing of his own as a solution. “Smart 
Edge” is good ‘ole Mr. P’s answer to the 
militant Vegans and firestorm lighters of 
the world. To find out more, buy this 
‘zine. Really, this is one of the most 
honest, intelligent, heartfelt, and thor- 
oughly enjoyable ‘zines that I have ever 

read. If you read one ‘zine this month 

(DL) 

($1 .50 or $1 .00 + 2 stamps to Peter Hart 
P.O. Box 950271 ' Mission Hills, CA 
That's right kids, we want to review 
your zine!! send it to 
Punk Planet South 
do Will Dandy 
Route 2 Box 438 
Leeds, AL 35094 










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ACID RAIN DANCE Melting Resistance 12" $6.50 
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PUNK PLANET #2(vrl Rancid, Lag Wagen, JChurch, 
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SOFA HEAD More.. LP $7.00 

SPITBOY True Self Revealed LP $5.00 

SPORK s/t 7“ $3.00 

STILL LIFE From Angry Heads double LP $7.00 
STRUGGLE s/t LP $5.00 

THAT'S IT Feel... 7" $3.50 

UNION AnaisthetizedT' $3.00 

TOXIC NARCOTIC People Suck CD $5.50 
V/A Give Me BackLP w / Amenity, Desiderata, Seein'Red, 
Spitboy, End of The Line, Man Lifting Banner, Bom 
Against, Econochrist, Profax, Suckerpunch, Sawhorse, 
Struggle, Bikini Kill, and Downcast. $5.00 

V/A Think Gobally, Act Locally 2x7" $5.00 

V/A This Inheritance Must Be Refused LP "Acollection of 
written, graphic and audible material on sexual politics 
and gender issues.''w/The Ex, Paxton Quiggly, Spitboy, 
One By One, Citizen Fish, Spork, & Dogfight. $6.00 
V/A War CD w / Warning, Jesus Chrust,Rors- 


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WARNING Protest & Still They Die 7" $3.00 

WHA T IS ANARCHISM? book $3.50 

YOUTH BRIGADE All Style... 7 " $3.00 

YOUTH BRIGADE Happy Hour LP $6.50 

YOUTH GONE MAD It's Spreading Again 7" $3.00 
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BACKISSUES AVAILABLE!! 

Did you miss out on the First or Second issue of PP? Don't feel bad, a lot 
of people did, but now you can order backissues and get those coveted 
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PP1 interviews with Gravity Records and Samiam. Short stories by Larry Livermore 
and Leah Ryan. An article about Touch & Go Records. Plus much more! ! 56 pages 
PP2 interviews with Rancid, Lagwagon, J Church, and Cool Beans Fanzine & BBS. 
An article on the Christian anti-queer movement. Short stories by Larry Livermore 
and Jose Moya. Plus much, much more!!! 64 pages. 

All backissues are $2.00 ppd 
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